Q&A: Host of podcast from the makers of ‘Serial’ dives into NC political scandal

Reporter Zoe Chace’s first visit to North Carolina’s rural Bladen County was back in 2016.

Republican operatives across the state were looking for examples of fraudulent votes that could help then-Gov. Pat McCrory close a narrow gap in the election total against Democrat Roy Cooper.

One of the examples was in Bladen, in the southeastern part of the state, where a local elected official named McCrae Dowless alleged that handwriting on multiple absentee ballots looked suspiciously similar. Dowless called it “a blatant scheme to try to impact the voting results,” according to a News & Observer story at the time.

Chace dug into the issue with a detailed report for “This American Life,” the popular public radio show. But she found herself back in North Carolina two years later when Dowless became the central figure in the absentee ballot scandal that prompted a do-over election in the 9th Congressional District.

Dowless is now facing criminal charges of absentee ballot fraud, and the candidate he was working for, Republican Mark Harris, retired from political life. But the finger-pointing over election fraud in Bladen County didn’t stop, and Chace continued to follow the story of the Bladen County Improvement Association, a Black get-out-the-vote advocacy group mentioned in both 2016 and 2018.

The result is a five-episode podcast series from the makers of the popular “Serial” podcast and The New York Times. It’s called “The Improvement Association,” and the first episode will be released on April 13.

The N&O spoke with Chace about the new podcast.

Q: What’s kept you coming back to this story?

A: It’s more what happened in 2018 that resurrected 2016, in a way, because in 2018 I watched the hearing about the congressional race in the 9th District.

It was a pretty crazy hearing. Every day, it seemed somebody would come on there and just be very emotional. We were watching people crying while they were testifying about very rudimentary, get-out-the-vote tactics.

You could see relationships fray between people. The first person to testify was McCrae Dowless’ ex-stepdaughter, and then her mom. It just was very intense. And then at the end of it, you have Mark Harris weeping because his son is crying, talking about how they should known all this stuff before.

And I had a feeling like they should have known all this stuff before, because I had reported on a similar election fraud question in 2016. And it seemed like things in Bladen, instead of falling in line, they exploded.

And because I knew a lot of the people … I was like, I want to know what happened here. This was the opposite of what I would have thought would have happened after what I saw in 2016.

And then I got a call from a guy who was implicated at the center of the scandal, and he was like, “Can you come down here? We have a backstory of what happened. We want to explain it to you.”

Q: What is it about Bladen County that makes it such fertile ground for an election fraud saga?

A: It’s a pretty poor county, and a lot of election-related jobs are like side gigs. It’s a way to jump in and make some money reliably, every election. People need the money, and that can lead to some sketchy things happening.

Also, there’s a big racial piece to it. There’s this Black advocacy group there that gets accused of election fraud that gets brought into the 2018 hearing. They get brought into it because election fraud accusations are often wielded at each other. There’s a deep, deep distrust between white and Black.

Q: What are the key unanswered questions from the 2018 election hearings that you’re trying to answer in this podcast series?

A: The biggest question that I had was: What was the involvement of this Black advocacy group? Its name came up a lot during the hearing, sort of suggesting that they had also done something wrong along with McCrae (Dowless).

And the thing that didn’t make any sense to me was that I knew that the leader of that group and McCrae did not get along — that they hated each other. And that their rivalry had actually brought them both to a hearing to fight some other accusations in 2016.

The central thing that I didn’t understand was this allegation that somehow these groups had been coordinating. It did not comport with what I knew about the place at all.

How did this one group get tangled up in that 2018 hearing? And then what’s the consequence on that group with turning out Black voters in Bladen afterwards, after they’ve been implicated in this way?

Q: What can the Bladen saga tell us about the post-2020 election debate over mail-in ballots?

A: As soon as I heard that there was going to be a change in policy last year during the pandemic, using a lot more absentee ballots, I was like, “Oh no.”

That’s because absentee ballots are like a Rorschach test for a lot of people just looking for fraud. And we’re going to be waiting on the results of this election forever.

Q: Bladen County has notoriously bad cell service and internet access, and you note in the podcast that most people there conduct their business in-person. Did the pandemic make it harder to get this story?

A: I had been there a lot beforehand, thank goodness. Making a cold call in Bladen and being like, “Come talk to me” is just really hard. In a pandemic, there’s just no way to hang around to get someone to talk to you.

But you can report in a pandemic, you just have to do a couple of weird things: You have to wear a mask all the time. You have to have a long microphone so you’re standing away from the person you’re talking to. It’s awkward, but you can do it. But it would have been so much harder to do it had I not been there already for two other elections.

I think some reporting has been lost because reporters were trying to figure this out.

More on ‘The Improvement Association’ podcast

▪ The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and other podcast services. For more on the podcast, go to The New York Times/Serial page.

▪ News & Observer reporters will discuss each episode weekly on the Under the Dome politics podcast, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the issues and reporting from those who covered the scandal. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and where you listen to podcasts.

▪ Come to newsobserver.com for a recap of each episode