Recap of Serial’s ‘The Improvement Association’ Chapter One: The Big Shadoo

This is a recap of the first 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.

Chapter One: Prologue

In the prologue to “The Improvement Association,” reporter Zoe Chace introduces listeners to a story that many in North Carolina will already have at least some familiarity with: the 2018 congressional race in North Carolina’s 9th district, in which Republican Mark Harris’s win over Democratic rival Dan McCready was thrown out because of absentee-ballot fraud in Bladen County.

Chace tells us it’s the one glaring voting fraud case that both Republicans and Democrats agree happened, and the only time in the past 80 years that a congressional election was thrown out because of fraud.

There were complaints, an investigation, a hearing, and eventually, a new special election. Here’s what happened, according to testimony from witnesses in the hearing: Harris hired operative McCrae Dowless to “get out the vote” in Bladen County. Dowless hired a handful of people to collect absentee ballots from voters (illegal in North Carolina), and those people sometimes even filled out the ballots for voters and turned them in (illegal everywhere).

Dowless and four others were charged with crimes (Harris was not) and Dowless is awaiting trial.

Chace had previously reported on election issues in Bladen County for the public radio show “This American Life,” back in 2016, so she had a Google alert set up for Dowless and tuned in for the 2018 hearings.

After a quick summary of what led to that 2018 hearing, Chace introduces listeners to a major character for Chapter 1: Horace Munn.

Zoe Chace heads to Bladen County

Chace knew Munn from her previous reporting in Bladen County and was surprised to see him at the 2018 hearing, which she watched online. Munn, a Black man, heads the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Democratic organization, and politically, Munn is a big rival of Dowless.

Munn was there because one allegation that popped up during the hearing was that the Bladen County Improvement Association was conspiring with Dowless, who was working for a Republican candidate. But why would that happen, Chace wondered?

After the hearing, Munn got in touch with Chace and asked her if she wanted to do an article about what was really going on in Bladen.

She did. And here we are.

A trip to Bladen County

Chace heads to Bladen County and describes the place for listeners: “a rural county in the southeastern part of North Carolina. Beautiful, a lot of green, open land when you drive through. Some of it’s farms, some tiny towns ... bad cell service, not great internet.”

She tells us that people there like to do business “face-to-face,” and that the election fights there are the same.

Also, she says, the oldest political fight in Bladen County is the fight to control the Black vote. And, Chace says, people in Bladen talk a lot about the idea that someone is always cheating.

Munn — a Bladen County native who retired from the Army and sits on the town council — has Chace come to the tiny town of East Arcadia, where she meets with a couple of county commissioners, a former board of elections member and a former sheriff.

They are all members of the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, but Chace explains it’s not a PAC in the way most of think of big money PACS — this is a local group that runs “get out the vote” campaigns during elections and endorses candidates.

They give her their insider’s take on Bladen County politics.

‘A big shadoo’

In the meeting with Chace, County Commissioner Michael Cogdell tells Chace that the PAC is coming under attack because it is too powerful.

The PAC reliably delivers Black voters in Bladen, and its endorsed candidates tend to win. The reason Republicans invoked its name during the Raleigh hearing, Cogdell says, was to distract attention from what the Republicans themselves were doing.

Cogdell tells Chace that state Republicans had to make “a big shadoo” out of the Dowless ballot fraud situation because there was too much publicity to ignore it, but that they dragged the BCIA PAC into the scrum to try to weaken or destroy them.

To really understand all of this, Munn interrupts, we need to go back to the Bladen County sheriff’s election of 2010.

Absentee ballots change the game

In 2010, Munn and the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC worked to get Prentis Benston, a Black candidate, elected as sheriff of Bladen County. Even though Benston was a good candidate — a well-liked deputy for 22 years with a rank of captain — it was not an easy thing to do in Bladen, which Chace says is roughly 30% Black and 60% white.

But Munn thought Benston, a Democrat, had a decent chance, and he knew if Benston could win the Democratic primary, he’d likely take the race.

Bladen tended to vote Democratic in local elections, Munn says, but the tension was between two factions of the Democratic Party: what he describes as the “good ol’ boy” system vs. the group that wanted change. The PAC promoted Benston as a candidate for change, but one who would be fair to everyone.

Benston lost the primary, but by such a slim margin that there was a runoff.

Runoffs in general have terrible election turnout, and the only polling site in Bladen County was in Elizabethtown, in the center of the county, far from Benston’s hometown and the less-populated areas with more minority voters.

The strategy that Munn came up with was to encourage voters — who he knew were unlikely to drive to E-Town to vote — to use absentee ballots to cast their votes for Benston.

Munn studied the statutes to determine how to legally use the ballots, being careful to “dot every I and cross every T,” knowing people would be suspicious of something that at that time, many did not understand.

And the practice did cause a great deal of controversy, especially when being used to elect the county’s first Black sheriff.

But it worked. Benston won the primary.

Those reluctant to give up power in Bladen County tried to keep Benston out of office, Chace says, but he prevailed, and was elected sheriff.

Dowless steals the playbook?

Here we circle back a bit to where we started: Dowless.

The Improvement Association PAC says its absentee ballot efforts and Benston’s unlikely win caught the attention — and admiration — of Dowless, who started “hanging around” with Munn and the group to learn all about how they did it.

Then, in the next election for sheriff, the Republican candidate hired Dowless to run an absentee ballot campaign, and they used the PAC’s playbook to defeat Benston.

Chace says that this started “an escalating absentee ballot war between the PAC and McCrae Dowless that culminated spectacularly in the 2018 congressional scandal” that made Bladen County famous.

Munn says all of it was white people’s reaction to Black voters putting a Black man in charge.

But, Chace tells us, that’s not how most people in Bladen County see it.

The story will continue in Part 2, coming Thursday, April 15.

How to listen to ‘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.