Recap of Serial’s ‘The Improvement Association’ Chapter Two: ‘Where Is Your Choice?’

This is a recap of the second episode of the five-episode podcast series “The Improvement Association,” from Serial Productions. In the series, reporter Zoe Chace uses a case in Bladen County, North Carolina, to examine the power of election fraud allegations. This is not a transcript and is not meant to be a substitute for listening to the podcast episodes.

In the first episode of “The Improvement Association” podcast we got background on the Bladen County absentee voter fraud scandal of 2018 (reading that Episode 1 recap will help you follow the story), particularly in regard to the relationship between the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black Democratic voter advocacy group, and McCrae Dowless, who is facing criminal charges for his actions while working for NC Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris.

In Chapter 2, released on April 15, reporter Zoe Chace explores allegations from critics of the Improvement Association PAC (these critics are primarily white Republicans in Bladen County), who believe, essentially, that whatever Dowless did, the PAC was doing it first.

As an intro to that angle, we hear from Bobby Ludlum, who was the head of the Bladen County Board of Elections in 2018, and learn how the illegal actions by Dowless and his workers were discovered.

According to Chace, employees at the Bladen County Board of Elections were noticing an increase in absentee ballot request forms being dropped off by Dowless’s associates. That in and of itself wasn’t a big deal, she says.

But then one day, someone noticed a request form in the name of the 94-year-old grandmother of a board of elections employee — someone they all knew did not vote — so Ludlum, a white Republican, looked through a stack of request forms himself. That’s when he saw a form in the name of his grandson, Harley, who he knew had no intention of voting, Ludlum said, and he confirmed with his grandson that the form was forged.

Ludlum reported it to the North Carolina State Board of Elections and they sent investigators to Bladen.

So that’s how it all started.

Still, Ludlum tells Chace that he believes Dowless got a raw deal. Why? Because the Bladen County Improvement Association had done “just as bad and maybe worse,” he said.

‘Let me tell you something’

Then Chace tells us about an encounter she had with a Bladen County voter while standing at a polling place with some TV reporters.

A woman approaches the group and lets fly a series of heated “let me tell you something” statements about how there has been cheating going on for years — cheating that she has reported, as a poll judge — and that it was being done by Democrats.

Chace identifies the woman as “Jane Pait, a longtime Republican,” who has been upset ever since Dowless got in trouble.

“Let me tell you something,” Pait says for the third or fourth time, and then lets out a frustrated growl. She tells Chace that there were two people in a recent election who charges could have been brought against, but it didn’t happen. When Chace asks her who she’s talking about, she won’t name them, but she does indicate they were with the Bladen County Improvement Association.

Chace makes a plan for another interview with Pait.

Pressured at the polls?

Chace reminds us that in Episode 1, Horace Munn, the head of the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, told her that Republicans are coming for the PAC now because they are trying to distract people from their own troubles. But, Chace says, Pait (and a lot of other people in Bladen) say that the cheating started with the Improvement PAC.

So Chace goes to Pait’s home to learn more, and Pait has files of complaint letters laid out for Chace to go through. (Chace also tells us that Pait lost family members recently, and that Pait admits that grief is fueling some of her anger about local politics.)

Pait has made complaints about the Bladen Improvement PAC through some letters and also through phone calls, and she goes over this with Chace.

After hearing her out, Chace tells us that what Pait presents is “less of a smoking gun and more of a general vibe of coercion or intimidation” on the part of the PAC. Pait thinks the PAC is not at the polls to help or support voters, but instead there to pressure them.

Pait tells Chace that on one occasion, the PAC set up its tent too close to curbside voting, and its members were handing out voting guides too close to where these voters would vote. She feels that with that kind of proximity to voters, the voters have no “choice” and they are “pressured” to vote a certain way.

Chace counters that the activity isn’t intimidating if people actually want the help.

Pait relays more stories about voters “from certain communities” (she means Black voters) being harassed by PAC workers, and Chace again reminds her that it’s only intimidation if the voter doesn’t want the help.

Pait, Chace says, is making a leap from seeing rules possibly being bent or broken to assuming how the people were feeling during the encounters.

In short, Pait thinks the Black PAC workers are intimidating Black voters into accepting assistance, whether they want it or not, in order to control how they vote. And even if the voter acts like they want the help, Pait still thinks it’s not right because the person was pressured to accept the help.

Chace tells us that she looks for records of complaints where voters felt they were assisted against their will or harassed or pressured by a PAC member, and there were none. State investigators have also looked for evidence of harassment at the polls, Chace says, and found nothing.

But to Pait, the absence of evidence only proves the power of the PAC.

Paying for votes?

Chase talks to another local poll worker, Mary Katheryn Mazur. Like Pait, Mazur believes she has witnessed bad behavior by Bladen Improvement Association PAC members at the polls.

Mazur describes watching PAC workers approach Black voters with sample ballots that were folded.

(Note: a sample ballot is essentially a voter’s guide. These are commonly handed out at the polls by both Democratic and Republican groups, and it is perfectly legal to do.)

Mazur’s issue was with how the sample ballots were handled.

First, they were folded, which apparently is unusual. And they were only given to Black voters.

Then, sometimes when the person came out from voting, they gave the ballot back to the PAC poll worker, but sometimes they threw it away. If they threw it away, a PAC worker would go through the garbage to retrieve it. The sample ballots were also numbered, Mazur said.

Mazur’s conclusion: “I will not say 100%, but I’m pretty confident there was something wrapped in the paper.” Like money? Chace asks. Again, Mazur is not 100% certain, but she’s pretty sure there was something wrapped in the ballot “to entice them to go in there and follow the procedures to the T.”

The more you look, Mazur says, the more you see.

Chace goes to the polls and watches all of this herself, and tells us that she sees what’s making “all of these white people so suspicious.”

Cogdell works the polls

Next, Chace is sitting outside the polls in a truck with George Michael Cogdell, who is running for reelection for Bladen County commissioner. While he talks to Chace, he’s continuously jumping out of the truck to greet Black voters, and Chace watches.

Chace says that for people who are already suspicious of the PAC, this behavior could reinforce the idea that something is fishy.

What she sees is that Cogdell only approaches Black voters, and that he hands them the sample ballot in a sort of “surreptitious” way. And the person, sensing the need to be secretive, receives it in the same manner — like the way you’d pass a note to someone in school, Chace says. Then after they vote, they do a “hand-to-hand pass” back to the poll worker.

Chace gets out of the truck and listens in as Cogdell greets a voter.

Cogdell shows the voter the sample ballot and goes over it with him, reading over the different candidates and giving bits of information about them (“this candidate lives over on Chicken Foot Road” ... “that candidate’s been there forever, she’s a white lady, she’s fine” — that sort of thing), but never telling the person who to vote for (the PAC preferences are marked on the paper).

Cogdell tells the person to take the ballot and use it however he wants, but asks for him to give it back to him when he’s finished with it.

Then Cogdell says, “I hope you can give me a vote, if you can.”

Chace says she listens in on a lot of these encounters between Cogdell and voters, and she notices three elements to each conversation: 1/ Please vote for me. 2/ Aren’t you related to someone I know? and 3/ Please give me the sample ballot back when you’re done.

Keeping an eye on sample ballots

Chace wonders why the PAC members handle the sample ballots like they are classified documents, so later, she asks Horace Munn about it.

Munn explains to Chace that if the sample ballot is lost, it is considered “compromised.”

That’s because in the past, Munn tells her, the PAC sample ballots have been stolen and used against them. Munn says people have made fake copies of Improvement Association PAC ballots, even printing them on the same color paper, and handed them out to Black voters — only with different candidates selected.

That is why, Munn says, he is very, very careful in how the sample ballots are handled.

The sample ballots are only given to poll workers, and even the poll workers don’t know the color of the sample ballots until the morning they get them to go to the polls. Any time Munn (remember, he’s a career Army man) thinks the sample ballot has been compromised, he makes a change to it.

Chace realizes that there is “an entire circle of suspicion going on” in Bladen County: Munn thinks that people in Bladen County are actively out to get him and the PAC, and that opponents (white people) will mess with their sample ballot — and he thinks this because he says they have done it before. So, Munn and the PAC poll workers treat the ballot secretively, which then looks suspicious to the white people, who are watching them and looking for suspicious behavior.

“Suspicion on one side increases suspicion on the other,” Chace says.

Chace also adds that having now been in Bladen County to observe three different elections, she has never seen the type of harassment that Pait described, but admits that as a white woman who is not from the area, Chace can’t speak to other social pressures Black voters might feel.

And of the Black people in Bladen County that Chace has interviewed, she says she has found some people who don’t like the PAC, but no one has ever said they felt pressured by them.

Voting with one voice

Instead of feeling pressured by the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC to vote in a certain way, Chace says that Black voters there tell her they want to vote together. Because of the racial makeup of the county, it’s the only way they feel they can get representation.

Here we get some background on how in the past, Black voters were never able to elect candidates they liked because of “racially polarized voting” — that’s when white voters prefer to vote for white candidates, and Black voters prefer to vote for Black candidates, when given the choice. And sometimes, Chace says, white people don’t even want to vote for white candidates who are supported by Black people.

A study during the 1980s showed that “racially polarized voting” was “persistent and severe” in Bladen County, which, Chace says, was about 60% white and about 39% Black at that time (Chace told us in the first episode that Bladen is now about 60% white and 30% Black).

Then after a series of lawsuits, Chace explains, Bladen County was broken into three districts, and Black voters finally had a chance to vote for the candidates they wanted. That means Black voters can often elect a third of the members of local governing bodies, like county commissioners and the school board — but only if they vote together, as a bloc, and with one voice.

This is why the Bladen Improvement PAC was formed: to organize Black voters and get those seats. And now, the Black vote in Bladen is important, and the support of the PAC is important to candidates.

But it only works if Black voters vote together, Chace tells us, and the cardinal rule of the PAC is “don’t split the Black vote.” If the Black vote splits between two Black candidates, they lose the seat every time, Cogdell tells her.

That’s why the PAC runs a tight ship, Chace says, adding that this is nothing new in politics. In fact, she says, “holding an interest group together with discipline is literally politics.”

The past isn’t even past

Episode 2 closes with more from Jane Pait, who tells us she knows history and knows “it took years to overcome all that stuff.”

But she also believes “with all her heart” that all of the trouble now is happening because everybody’s trying to make up for all the bad stuff that happened in the past.

Pait tells us she believes that because of “history” and voter suppression that happened “in the past,” some people who work at the polls in Bladen County are now over-correcting. They don’t want to be called bigots, so they let Black groups like the Improvement PAC get away with more than they should.

Pait references the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 as an example of past trouble, but says her views now are based on what she knows from her lifetime, not from the past. And she believes that right now, there is no voter suppression. She’s never seen it, she says. She wants people to forget about the past and “move on.”

Chace points out — to the listener, not in conversation with Pait — that Pait’s idea of voter suppression is very literal.

“Almost like, if there’s not a big, burly guy at the polls hurling people into bushes who are trying to vote, then no one is being prevented from voting,” Chace says.

Then Chace lays out the other types of voter suppression that are going on now (for example, limiting the number of polling places for a runoff election, ahem, Elizabethtown). She tells us that that most of these methods are happening through legislation, and don’t require anyone to get in anyone’s face at the polls: cutting back on early voting days, not letting voters vote out of precinct, requiring certain types of IDs to vote.

All of this, Chace says, makes voting trickier, and she says election experts describe these kinds of laws as a form of voter suppression that target Black voters specifically.

Chace ends the episode wondering if there is actual evidence that the Improvement PAC is cheating, or if it’s just suspicion. So many people in Bladen County are so ready to believe that the PAC is cheating that it has created an environment where any accusation about them can “take hold and grow,” Chace says, and even a provably false allegation can turn into a weapon and be used against them.

More about that in Episode 3.

How to listen to ‘The Improvement Association’

There are five episodes of “The Improvement Association.”

You can listen from “The Improvement Association” landing page on The New York Times website, or download through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you normally listen to podcasts.