State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past…

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which organizes and finances the party’s House strategy, used the debacle in North Carolina to demand that Democrats support a national ban on the collection of absentee ballots — a practice that is legal in many states but not in North Carolina.

Prosecutors in the Trump administration have been conducting a high-profile investigation in North Carolina for months to find noncitizens who cast illegal ballots, many of them in apparent ignorance of the law. But although the state elections board sent Justice Department officials evidence of absentee-ballot fraud by Mr. Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before last November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.