Serial - The Improvement Association - Ep. 1

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Following a notorious case of election fraud in Bladen County, North Carolina, in 2018, the reporter Zoe Chace gets an invitation from Horace Munn, the leader of the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black political advocacy group whose name was dragged into the scandal. Horace asks Zoe to come down and investigate for herself and find out who is really cheating. To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at [e-mail] 

Thank you. If you're already a Time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, this is the Improvement Association. Prologue, Other People's Ballots. There is one glaring example, one, of an election fraud case that Republicans and Democrats agree happened. It was 2018 in North Carolina, the only time in recent history, recent like the last 80 years, that a congressional election was thrown out for fraud. Democrats like to talk about this case because it was Republicans who did the cheating. Republicans like to talk about it without mentioning who did the cheating because it proves that election fraud does happen,

which it does. Not very often, but it does. I like to talk about this case because of how personal the whole thing was, how rooted in this one county. It wasn't the result of some complex national conspiracy to rig voting machines. It was individual people in a tight-knit place, using their relationships to either make money or take revenge or both.

It looks like this. In the midterm election of 2018, this guy Mark Harris, white, Republican, former Baptist pastor, ran for Congress in North Carolina. Seemed at first like he definitely won. He beat the Democrat by 905 votes. But in one of the counties in his district, Bladen County, the number of absentee ballots was suspiciously high. Way out of whack with the rest of the district. Before the election was even over, wild complaints from voters were pouring in. People said their absentee ballots had been taken from their homes and then their ballots had never made it into the board of elections to be

counted. Or that they handed their blank ballots to others to be filled out. Or that their signatures were forged. The state board of elections held a big hearing to figure out what was going on. That's when I clicked into it because I know Bladen County. Two years earlier, I had done a radio story on a small election scandal in this exact same place. Ever since, I'd had a Google alert on the guy at the center of both cases, McCray Dowless. This quiet white guy in a windbreaker, smoking a cigarette, a real operator, an elections pro who seemed to specialize in getting out the vote via absentee ballot. Now here he was, turning up again at this big state hearing about cheating. To me, the hearing was riveting because of the testimony. Now,

McRae is basically an elections professional who loves politics, but the people who worked for him, who took the stand and testified, they were not like that. This was a job they did for a few weeks or a few months for a little extra money, And they all seemed kind of dazed and upset that this side gig had landed them here, facing a long table of lawyers. One young woman named Kelly Hendricks, with a baby face, looked so nervous when she took the stand. I saw her take this deep breath

and carefully exhale before she began talking. The state investigator asked her if she worked for McCraray Dallas in the 2018 election. Yes, ma'am. And at the very next question... Could you tell the board how you first met Mr. McCray Dallas? Kelly's face crumpled up just like a kid, and she started to cry.

It was hard to watch. She grabbed a tissue and tried to talk through it. She said she'd been working at Hardee's, and McCray came through the drive-thru. That's how they first met. And just from there, he resembled my dad so much that I just, I connected with them. And from there, that's how I met them. Kelly ended up working Get Out the Vote for McCray. She offered absentee request forms to family members,

her boyfriend's family, a Hardee's customer. She said she'd picked up absentee ballots, which is illegal in North Carolina, and that she'd brought the ballots back to McCray instead of to the Board of Elections. Sometimes, she said, he asked her to sign as a witness on absentee ballots she had not actually witnessed when they were being filled out. So much of the testimony was emotional. You got this real sense of betrayal.

McCray's whole get-out-the-vote operation seemed to lean heavily on people who were close to him. One of McRae's workers was his stepdaughter. Another was his ex-wife, the stepdaughter's mom. When Lisa Britt, the stepdaughter, took the stand for most of the day, she looked miserable, like her head was almost too heavy for her hand to hold up.

She testified that she'd taken ballots from people's homes. Again, illegal in North Carolina. And she'd filled ballots out for voters after the fact. Illegal everywhere in the United States of America. So you were filling in the ovals and voting for other people, right? Yes, sir. You were voting other people, right? Yes, sir. You were voting other people's ballots? Yes, sir.

Right. I assume you knew that it was not legal to vote other people's ballots. Right. We were paid to do it. I understand you, but you were paid to do something that you knew was wrong. Yes, sir. Why didn't you ask any questions about what McCray was asking you to do, the lawyer started to say at one point, and Lisa snapped at him.

Mr. Dallas has been a father figure to me for 30 years, so no, there's a lot of things that you kind of would place trust in. It's someone that's your father that's not going to put you out here to do something illegal. McCray didn't take the stand. He also declined, very politely, my interview requests. At the end of four days of hearings, Mark Harris, the Republican candidate McCray was working for, announced he was stepping aside and he himself called for a new election. The state of North Carolina agreed and set a called for a new election. The state of North Carolina agreed

and set a date for a special election. The whole scene made me sad. It felt very human-sized. Meeting up at the Hardee's drive-thru? McRae Dallas was indicted on 13 counts, including perjury, obstruction. He has yet to plead. Okay, so. You know how in TV shows, sometimes there's a minor character who later goes on to have a whole show built around them? That character, from this hearing, is a man named Horace Munn. During the hearing, Horace Munn made a tiny guest appearance. McRae's stepdaughter talked about him. She said she'd seen this guy Horace in McRae's office while the election was going on. He'd been making copies of absentee ballot request forms for some reason, she said. She believed he'd been coordinating with McRae.

Horace was in the audience while she was saying this, one of the only Black guys in the audience, it looked like. At the request of the state board, she pointed him out. Can we get his name, please, for the record? The gentleman's name is Horace Munn. Are you Mr. Munn? Yes, sir. All right. Thank you, sir. When I saw Horace pop up in the hearing, I was like, what the hell?

Because I knew Horace. He was part of that story I did a few years earlier in Bladen County. I knew he was the head of the political arm of a Black Democratic organization in Bladen called the Bladen County Improvement Association. And I knew Horace and McCray were huge political rivals. I knew they couldn't stand each other. Watching this hearing, Horace's name only came up a bit, but the name of his organization was invoked a lot. It was weird every time.

People were claiming that the Bladen County Improvement Association had been working with McCray and that they must be cheaters too. But why would a Democratic organization be conspiring with a Republican operator on absentee ballot fraud to benefit the Republican candidate? The Bladen Improvement Group wasn't the focus of this hearing. This was about the fraud McCray's team had allegedly perpetrated for the Republicans. And yet, in the closing remarks for the hearing, it seemed the state board had somehow landed on a both sides conclusion. And I just wanted to say to North Carolina voters

that this board of election will work and continue to work until the activities of individuals such as McCrae Dallas and organizations such as the Bladen County Improvement Association no longer create any confusion and chaos in our elections. Thank you, sir. Not long after this all happened, I got a call in the middle of the night. Hello, Ms. Chase. This is Horace, the person you talked to a couple years ago. It was Horace Munn, head of Bladen Improvement.

He had something he wanted to explain to me about that hearing. He wanted to explain the entire world it had come from. He texted, Hi, just thinking and wanted to know if you would consider doing an article about the South and Bladen County. I did consider it. From Serial Productions, I'm Zoe Chase, and this is The Improvement Association, a true story about election fraud. Chapter 1. The Big Should Do. After one, the big should do. Bladen is 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. Often, when I want to talk to someone there, people don't tell me how to reach them, but where to find them. Oh, Mike, he's at the barbershop in Elizabethtown. Oh, that guy, he hangs out outside the hardware store. There's bad cell service, not great internet. People do a lot of business face-to-face. And the election fights are like that too, face-to-face. Or hand-to-hand, really. I'm going to tell you the story of how this place ended up becoming

the only place in modern times that threw out a congressional election for fraud. What led to that election is a series of elections, all of them on the ground gritty like the place itself. And what underlies all of it is the very oldest fight in Bladen County, the fight to control the Black vote. The idea that some people cheat is something people here talk about all the time. That someone's getting over, someone's cutting corners, someone's breaking the rules, specifically when it comes to elections. When I first headed down here, after the text from Horace, my questions were simple.

Was he in on some kind of conspiracy with McCray? And what did he want to tell me? And I thought that's what I'd be talking about, election corruption or something. But this group of people Horace Munn told me I needed to meet. He said, come down here. I got two county commissioners, a former board of elections person, and a former sheriff, all ready to meet. He said, come down here. I got two county commissioners, a former Board of Elections person, and a former sheriff,

all ready to talk. So I showed up in the tiny town hall of the tiny town of East Arcadia. That was in the late 80s, early 90s. Everyone was already talking when I got there. They're all deep into local politics, and listening to them

is like when basketball fans talk about March Madness or something. I don't know the teams. I don't know the players. The small talk is really hard for me to follow. And another person ran. Which office was this? And that was the county commissioner. He ran for county commissioner. Almost everyone here is a member of Horace's organization, the full name of which is the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC. Members of the PAC generally just call it the PAC, even though it's not a PAC the way people usually think of a PAC. It's not a sluice for dark money, doesn't bankroll TV commercials.

This is what it is, a local group that runs get-out-the-vote campaigns during elections for and by Black people in Bladen County. They endorse candidates. Sometimes they get money from candidates, not every single time. And usually they get money from the state Democratic Party. The meeting is awkward at first. I'd expected Horace to sort of take the lead here, but he's hanging back, sitting at the furthest corner of the table, quiet. Horace, kind of short, stocky, almost always with his trademark accessories of sunglasses and cap, even indoors. I don't want you to see my eyes, he said once. And I was like, but that makes it way harder for me to see how you're feeling.

That's the point, he told me. Horace is private. He does not like to feel things in public. He grew up here in this little town of East Arcadia. He's retired now. He was career army, but he's pretty involved in his town. He's on the town council, has been for 10 years. He's the volunteer fire chief. During elections, he's running the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC.

Anyway, I kept waiting for Horace or someone to haul off like, and here's what we want to tell you about the cheating, reporter, but it's not happening. So finally, I'm like... Well, I'm happy to take you guys through the questions that I have, but I also do want to say that when Horace and I spoke, he said that there were some things that some of you guys had on your mind that you wanted to discuss. And, you know, part of the, like, a big part of the reason I came down here today for this meeting specifically was to find out what that is, hear what you're thinking about. Long pause. Then a little more chatting,

until finally, Horace's friend Cogdale, George Michael Cogdale, everyone calls him Cogdale, kind of takes over the meeting, as he's wont to do. He's been in the Bladen Improvement Pack even longer than Horace. Cogdale's an intense guy, a fast talker. I'm going to say this, and I'm going to work on the horse, and I'm going to say it. They've been trying to get rid of us ever since I've been associated with the PAC. Because it's very simple. If they don't endorse you, you can't win.

If they don't endorse you. Actually meaning, if we don't endorse you, we the Bladen Improvement PAC. If the PAC doesn't endorse you, you can't win, Cogdale's saying. For years, the pack has been a powerful force in Bladen politics because the pack reliably delivers votes, black votes. Politicians, both white and black, often court the pack because their endorsement's so valuable. It can swing elections.

That's why the Bladen Improvement Pack is coming under attack, Cogdale's saying, because we're too powerful. The thing Cogdale and Horace want to tell me is this. Republicans have been cheating down here. In each election, they get bolder. And each time, Republicans and Bladen try to paint the pack with the crimes that they themselves are committing. This is how these guys see it. That's what was going on in Raleigh, Horace says,

during the state hearing about McCray-Dowless. Republicans bring up the PAC to distract from McCray. He says it's a strategy. They were fully aware of what McCray was doing. But what they would do was, to throw off on McCray, they would always talk about the Bladen Improvement PAC doing illegal activities. They would keep the heat off of him by putting on the Bladen Improvement PAC. They made a big should-do about McCray because they had to. But what they really want to talk about is us, Cogdell's saying.

And he waves around his big mug of ice. The hearing, Morris says, was just more of the same, except bigger, in order to bring the pack down once and for all, in order to weaken its power or just kill it off. But why, I'm asking him, and Horace interrupts. Let me explain something to you. Yeah. Let's go back to 2010.

Let me explain something to you, Horace says. Let's go back to 2010. Let me explain something to you, Horace says. Let's go back to 2010. And this is where Horace really pipes up. Horace leans across the table to tell me what he sees as the origin story of how that 2018 congressional race blew up. What's behind all these election fraud allegations and blatant. And what the Republicans have been up to for the last 10 years here. He wants to tell me what all that has to do with the PAC and with him. In 2010, the PAC fought to get Horace's friend, Prentice Benston, elected as the first Black

sheriff in Bladen County's history. Horace had just become the president of the PAC, and he had this big plan. I knew that it was going to be a hard campaign for him to win. Knowing the breakdown of Bladen County, i.e. the racial breakdown, it was, we knew it was going to be tough. He couldn't win with just Black votes. He had to have white votes. Bladen County, around 35,000 people,

is about 30% Black and 60% white. So usually, white people decided who was sheriff. Horace knew, as a rule, white people didn't vote for Black candidates in this county. So, if you're running a Black candidate in a county-wide race, trying to win a majority of the county, and the majority of the county, and the majority of the county is white, you'll definitely lose. But Horace thought Prentice Benston was different. He had a real chance to pick up some white voters. There was this feeling at the time, Horace says. Obama had just been elected president. He'd won North Carolina. Some white people would vote for a Black man to be in charge. And Prentice was a good candidate.

He'd been a sheriff's deputy for 22 years. He was a captain, had a lot of friends in the department. He had a business degree. He knew how to manage people. People liked him. It was not really just about having the first Black sheriff. Prentice is an outgoing person, a nice person. When it comes to carrying out his duties as sheriff, he worked in the white communities as well as the Black communities.

When you looked at those who were running, he was the most qualified. Prentice Benston was also a Democrat, which maybe sounds like a disadvantage in a conservative rural southern county. But at the local level, Bladen County back then was almost all Democrats. Plenty of people would vote for Republican candidates for president, but local elections in Bladen, they were all decided in the Democratic primary, pretty much. When I was in Bladen, one thing I kept hearing about that time was the real split in the county was between the Democrats who did not want to change the system and the Democrats who did. The good old boy system, which everyone talks about down here and

basically boils down to white favoritism. Sort of two parts letting things slide, one part hooking people up, a job, contract, and off the books approval, stuff like that. But Horace was betting that some white people in Bladen, maybe just enough, were feeling like the good old boy system was not working great for them. Like they weren't benefiting, They weren't getting the favors or the passes. And a couple of the people it wasn't working for were other sheriff's deputies. White guys who knew Prentice and ended up throwing themselves into the campaign. One became his campaign manager. They'd tell other skeptical white people, Prentice Benston is fair. He's not a good old boy, obviously. And don't worry, he's not just going to start favoring the Black people.

He's just straight ahead, same rules for everyone. Wouldn't that be a nice change? So, in the primary for sheriff, there were five people running. The leading candidate was this white deputy named Eric Bryan. By all accounts, Eric Bryan was funny, he was a tease, popular. The outgoing sheriff endorsed him. I think it's fair to say that most people in the county pretty much just assumed that Eric Bryan would win. And Eric Bryan did win the primary, but not by enough. He didn't get enough

votes to clinch it. By law, there had to be a runoff election between the two highest vote getters. And the second highest vote getter was Prentice Benston. That's where things get super intense in Bladen County. Horace was like, oh, we could actually win. We got so close. This could really happen. We got to get people to vote in the runoff. But getting people to vote in a runoff election is hard. Turnout usually goes down in a runoff. And Horace had a big problem. When it came to the runoff, you only had one polling site.

That was Elizabethtown. Elizabethtown is in the center of the county. Horace's hometown, East Arcadia, is a smooth half-hour drive south. The whole southern part of the county is primarily Black. It's a lot of gas to Elizabeth Town and back. And in a poor, spread-out rural county, that can be a real factor in whether people will cast a vote. This was a big deal. For us, it put us at a disadvantage because most of your minorities are in your outlying areas other than Elizabethtown. And the distance from here for someone to go to Eton and vote early, it's not going to happen. Whereas for people in Dublin, Bladenborough,

they're close to Elizabethtown. And those are your majority white areas. So we had to figure out a strategy to level the playing field. The way Horace tells it, the strategy hit him like a bolt of lightning. He loves to tell this story about his stroke of genius. It was the middle of the night. Horace has insomnia. He doesn't sleep much. This particular night, I was lying there.

And about 3 o'clock, 3.30 in the morning, I called Prince. He was asleep. He was asleep. I said, wake up. I figured it out. I said, what are ours? I said, we can win. He said, how? I said, absentee ballots.

Absentee ballots as a get-out-the-vote strategy. That was the idea. You're familiar with this aha moment now, I think, here in 2021. The entire Democratic Party was struck by this exact same idea when the pandemic hit. To deal with a possible low turnout because COVID, crank up the number of votes by absentee ballot. But 10 years ago in North Carolina, absentee voting wasn't that common. So Horace had this new idea. He was amped. His dad had been a big part of the Bladen Improvement Pack.

And after Horace retired from the Army and came home, he and his dad talked politics a lot. Strategy. And now, the year of the sheriff's race, Horace was the brand-new president of the PAC. And he mobilized the group around his absentee ballot idea like it was some kind of military op. It was going to be a whole different thing. In order to do absentee ballots,

we had never done them before as an organization. So it was a new adventure. So I actually got a copy of the law governing how to complete an absolute violence, legally. And I took all the information, I studied it, and then at my next scheduled meeting at the Blade Improvement, I gave a class. And at first, there were some that were questioning Horace is a big fan of rules, of the statutes, which when it comes to absentee ballots can be extensive. His time in the military makes him a little straight-backed. He also has this thing where he's always watching out for people trying to trip him up. He told me that once in the army, an officer was ordering weapons parts for himself,

illegally, and tried to get Horace to look the other way, expecting him to go along to get along. Horace is not into that. He's cautious, and he's suspicious, because he knows people are suspicious of him. I dot every I and I cross every T. I cannot stand someone having something that they can use to hurt me or control me. No one can control me. That's why I operate in accordance with the statutes when dealing with this voter election stuff. Anytime I involve myself with something, I read regulations first. Horace had to contend with a lot of suspicion.

First of all, suspicion from Black voters. They weren't used to the whole absentee ballot process. So the PAC hired workers from Black areas to fan out across the county and knock on the doors in their own neighborhoods. Driving through all the spread out parts, across big tobacco and sunflower fields. Certain areas that we felt that were critical to the election, that's where we trained the people and sent them back into their hometowns. Then, Horace had to contend with the suspicion of the County Board of Elections members. He figured they'd raised their eyebrows at a whole bunch of new absentee ballot requests coming in

from anywhere, but especially his PAC. At the same time, Horace was also deeply suspicious of them. He believed the board members were part of the good old boys system, and he took it on faith that they'd be trying to help the other side, Eric Bryan, the white candidate. And that if the Board of Elections people figured out what Horace and the PAC were doing with absentee ballots, using them as a get-out-the-vote strategy. They'd mess with them or tip off the opposition.

I told the members to keep it low-key, that we wanted to operate under the radar, and that when they figured out what was going on, it would be too late to react. That's what happened. To keep it low-key, Horace and Cogdale would drop off the absentee ballot request forms in small batches, a few at a time, from disparate parts of the county.

So it would take longer for the board to catch on that there was a thing. Eventually, of course, people did notice that the Bladen Improvement Pack was doing something. And apparently that was news. It's called the Bladen County Improvement Association, and it's been operating for at least 30 years. But who exactly runs this organization is a mystery to many residents. This is a local TV news segment, pretty typical of local news coverage of the PAC around that time. It features close-ups of official-looking documents. And then, cut to a guy in his dining room talking to a TV reporter, with those documents artfully spread out on the table before him.

They say they're Bladen County Improvement Association. And if they are, I might would want to be a member. I want to improve Bladen County. I would like to see it grow and be beautiful. But I've never seen a park that they cleaned up, never seen any playground equipment. I'm not saying they've not done this, but if they have, I don't have any knowledge of it. Instead, the only thing resident Benny Callahan sees this group do is work to influence the outcome of the elections.

It's a one-interview story with one random white guy in the county. Not the mayor, not a politician. He's a literal rando. But now that I've talked to a lot of people in Blading County, I do think his view actually did represent how lots of white conservatives were feeling about the association. Benny Callahan thinks the group holds far too much sway and literally controls who gets elected through a group of hundreds of residents who vote exactly the way they're told.

They control our day-to-day lives. And they're electing people that maybe I don't want and maybe a lot of the people in Bladen County don't want. The TV story didn't mention that Bladen Improvement is an all-Black political organization in a majority-white county. But of course, that was the central dynamic of this election. Bladen had been living with the power of the PAC for years, and they did have a lot of influence. But using that to put the first Black guy in the sheriff's office brought a lot to the surface.

Things got vicious inside the sheriff's office brought a lot to the surface. Things got vicious inside the sheriff's department. Wanda Monroe, a black sheriff's deputy who's in the PAC, said she was used to getting along with everybody at work. But once her white colleagues realized that Eric Bryan, the white candidate, might lose and Prentice could win, things got bad. Caucasians that were for Eric did not mind making it known that they did not want to be ruled by a Black sheriff. Not in their lifetime. Blaine County never had one.

They don't need one, was some of the words that I had heard. So people, were they saying that out in the open? How were people making that known? Yeah, they are both So did people come up to you and say it's your face? Yes, because they were looking for a reaction Because they wanted to know who I was endorsing

Prentice told me he started to worry for his safety He declined an offer to go to the firing range with some white deputies at one point. He just didn't trust people, he said. Started taking precautions. Stopped eating at certain places. The reason so many people were agitated over this election is because we're talking about the sheriff's office. It is hard to overstate the

power a sheriff's office has in a place like this. In a rural county with tiny or non-existent local police forces in the few towns that exist, the sheriff is a sort of king deciding what law enforcement looks like in the county, whose businesses are getting busted for bending the rules, whose kids are getting a verbal warning, whose kids are getting arrested. One time, I was sitting with Horace's friend Cogdale, who were in his truck, to get out of the cold, and we were talking about all the opposition to Prentiss, and he brought up another aspect of the sheriff's power that I hadn't even considered. A sheriff is as close as you can get to omniscient in a rumory place like this one. You got to understand when you get into certain positions, Zoe, here's what you open up. It's

just like this. In my house, on the head of my house, when things happen in my house, it comes by me. When you're in the leadership role, everything must come by you. All the knowledge and all the secrets and everything have to come by you. So at that point in time, it ain't no more secrets. So what's that have to do with Prentiss running for sheriff? Everything he had, they didn't want him knowing everything that came through that system. The sheriff knows people's business in the county, the human part, the embarrassing or the tragic, as well as the criminal or the unethical. That kind of power is not something any Black person in Blading County had ever had before,

so far as I can tell. If your child had committed a crime, or if your child had some drug issues, if you were writing bad checks and they're going all over the place and you high and mighty, so who would know it? Prince would have to know all of it.

The day of the runoff came. There were 17 polling places open. The PAC had workers at 16 of them. One was a church. They didn't want electioneering on the property. Horace did what he does every election day. He started around 7.30 and drove around to all the polling places, checked in with the poll workers, dropped off their checks.

The PAC poll workers are paid by the PAC, a stipend for gas and food. He was probably asking everyone, have you seen a lot of minorities voting today? He does that. And then when he finished his rounds, he waited. Bladen County always gathers to watch election returns at the county courthouse. And that night it was packed and also silent

as the results clicked in. Nearly every Black voter cast a vote for Prentice Benston, plus a few white voters. And Prentice Benston won by almost 300 votes. Horace's strategy had worked. It was the absentee ballots that made the difference. Wanda Monroe, the sheriff's deputy who's in the pack, she remembers that night.

This is strictly opinion. You know that, right? But it was almost like they realized that we weren't dumb. That we are living, breathing human beings with brains. That's what it felt like? Yes. Like, okay, they smart. You may be too smart for their own good. In the days following the election,

Horace, who should have been celebrating up and down the county, was upset. I felt like it was a highway robbery. I felt they had done Prentice wrong. I was angry. Prentice's victory was short-lived. Horace had a whole other problem on his hands. That's after the break. Prentice Benston had won the runoff for the Democratic primary. He'd beat Eric Bryant.

And throughout the race, the county government had been saying whoever won the runoff would be the sheriff. Because in Bladen County, the Democratic primary was the election when it came to the sheriff's race. A Republican challenger for sheriff, if there even was one, had no chance. So Horace says that he'd been told, that everyone had been told, the primary winner would be appointed right away to serve through the general election. But they were under the assumption that Eric Bryant was going to win. And he lost. And all of a sudden, I hear rumors that we're going to bring somebody else in. Okay, real quick.

What happened next is like a little play within a play farce of small town politics. I'm going to tell you because it's an illustration of how badly it seems people in power did not want Prentice Benston to take office. First, the county commission doesn't seat him. Instead, the commission votes on an interim sheriff, this guy Earl Storms, to serve till December. He's a former sheriff from the 80s. But what the commissioners don't all account for, apparently, is that Earl Storms is a Prentice-Benson booster. He'd hired him back when. And so Earl Storms' first move as sheriff is to let go of Deputy Eric Bryan, the candidate Prentice-Benson had just beaten the runoff.

And also, four other deputies who were Eric Bryan. The candidate, Prentice Benston, had just beaten the runoff. And also, four other deputies who were Eric Bryan supporters. Poof. Suddenly, they were out of jobs. Interim Sheriff Storms reportedly posts a memo telling everyone, answer to Prentice Benston, not to me. Then the commission is like, this isn't what we wanted to happen, and tries to get rid of Earl Storms. It was like, who's in charge? Everyone's mad. There were big, angry meetings covered by local news. While commissioners appointed him to the job, it seems state law won't allow the board to fire him. We can ask him to resign, but we can't make him resign.

We can't do nothing with him. What was supposed to be calm has only spawned storms. In the meantime, a petition surfaces to get a guy onto the ballot in time for the general election. A former highway patrolman, this white guy, Billy Ward. A Democrat who filed as an independent who suddenly had a lot of muscle behind him. Finally, finally, it's election night again. This time in November, after Horace and everyone else has cranked out a third get-out-the-vote

effort for the same election. The whole should-do all over again. And now everyone's gathered in the courthouse. I'm John Rundleman at the courthouse in Elizabethtown in Bladen County. And pardon the pun, but there's a new sheriff in town in Bladen County, and it's Prentice Benston. Congratulations tonight. How does this sound, Sheriff Prentice Benston? That sounds good. Certainly, John, it's a great day, a great night for Bladen County, for me. Did you know that when Prentice actually won, I stayed home? On the night of the general?

Yes. Why? Stayed home. On the night of the general? Yes. Why? Stayed home. Horace gets a little starry-eyed when he talks about the victory. I would have gotten so emotional if he had lost. So I stayed home. Yeah. So what happened when Prentice called you that night?

Oh, I was ecstatic. Oh, I remember it. It's like yesterday. What happened? I was jumping for joy. Unbelievable. Dream come true. Hard work and hard work to pay it off.

I think the next day I slept. And I think, I said, you know what? I'm so excited. I went and brought me a new car. Are you serious? Yes. That's when I bought the SUV I'm driving. The which that you're driving?

The SUV. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I bought that car after the election. Sure did. Yeah, I remember. Winning is so sweet. But this victory is not the point of the story. It's not why Horace is telling it to me.

The whole point of Horace's story is what happened next, after the first Black sheriff in Blading County was elected, with the help of a slew of absentee votes. The point of the story is this. Horace got a visit from a local guy, a guy who worked during the sheriff's race for Prentiss' opponent. This man came to see Horace after the race was over, shook his hand, was like, good game. It was McCray Dowless. It was McCray. McCray, once the election was over, he said, you got me. He wasn't a sore loser. We talked about it. And he actually befriended us.

In a sense, he started hanging around. How so? At the time, he was a Democrat. Right. So he dealt with us through the Democratic Party. So he befriended us and hung around long enough to learn a little bit how we were doing what we were doing. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do it, but he kind of hung around a little bit. But like, what does hang around mean? Come to the Democratic meetings and talk about, congratulate us on our success with the absentee ballots and stuff like that. Horace and McCray shared an obsession with Bleaden County politics, which I too now share.

They talked on the phone a lot. They talked about the absentee ballot, get out the vote strategy, how exactly it worked. They were on the same side for a little while. But then, just four years later, as more and more people in Blading County were starting to vote Republican in local elections, a viable Republican candidate ran for sheriff. That Republican campaign for sheriff ended up working with McCray Dowless to get out the vote. And how did McCray get out the vote? He ran an absentee ballot get-out-the-vote program, very much like the one the PAC had run four years earlier to get Prentiss elected. McCray's involvement is spelled out in court documents, including an affidavit from McCray.

Lots of absentee ballots poured in that year. But Prentiss lost. Prentiss's sheriff's term was the shortest in more than 80 years. The way Horace sees it, the 2010 sheriff's race in Bladen County began an escalating absentee ballot war between the PAC and McCray-Dallas that culminated spectacularly in the 2018 congressional scandal,

where Bladen County became famous for alleged election cheating. So basically what happened was McCrae decided to take our strategy and use it against us. We will operate within the law. He was operating outside of the law. That's Horace's story of how the fraud started here, as a white reaction to Black voters putting a Black man in charge.

But of course, that's not how everyone in Bladen County sees it. I'd venture to say not even how most people in Bladen County see it. I don't know who trained who. But if you think Horace Munn is less guilty than McCray Dallas, you're smoking some strange stuff. That's next time on the Improvement Association is produced by Nancy Updike and me. Neil Drumming is our managing editor. Julie Snyder is the executive editor.

Additional editing by Sarah Koenig and Ira Glass. R.L. Nave is our editorial consultant. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan. Music supervision and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Amy Padula is our associate producer. Inde Chubu is the supervising producer. Original music composed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce. Additional support from the staff at This American Life. Thank you. Nassero, and Nora Keller. Special thanks to Tim Tyson, Michael Bitzer, Hakeem Brown,

Joe Bruno, Dr. Niyambi Carter, Al Daniels, Herman Dunn, Mark Elias, Steve Lesane, Jens Lutz, Eric Ostermeyer,

Kenny Simmons, and Zach St. Louis. The Improvement Association is produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times.