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Episode: The Improvement Association - Ep. 1

Author: Serial Productions & The New York Times
Duration: 00:44:38

Episode Shownotes

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 [email protected]

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_01
These first two episodes of The Improvement Association are free, but to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to The New York Times, where you'll get access to all the Serial Productions and New York Times shows. And it's super easy.

00:00:16 Speaker_01
You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're already a Times 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.

00:00:38 Speaker_04
There is one glaring example, one, of an election fraud case that Republicans and Democrats agree happened.

00:00:47 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:03 Speaker_04
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

00:01:15 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:25 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:35 Speaker_04
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.

00:01:52 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:09 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:21 Speaker_04
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 Blading County.

00:02:31 Speaker_04
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, McCrae Dowless.

00:02:45 Speaker_04
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.

00:03:03 Speaker_04
To me, the hearing was riveting because of the testimony. Now, McCrae 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.

00:03:17 Speaker_04
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,

00:03:31 Speaker_04
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 McRae Dallas in the 2018 election.

00:03:47 Speaker_06
— Yes, ma'am. — And at the very next question… — Could you tell the board how you first met Mr. McRae Dallas?

00:03:56 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:12 Speaker_05
And just from there, he resembled my dad so much that I just...

00:04:25 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:40 Speaker_04
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.

00:04:50 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:05 Speaker_04
McCrae's whole get-out-the-vote operation seemed to lean heavily on people who were close to him. One of McCrae's workers was his stepdaughter. Another was his ex-wife, the stepdaughter's mom.

00:05:16 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:32 Speaker_04
And she'd filled ballots out for voters after the fact. Illegal everywhere in the United States of America.

00:05:39 Speaker_12
— So you were filling in the ovals… and voting for other people, right? — Yes, sir. — You were voting other people's ballots. — Yes, sir. — I assume you knew that it was not legal to vote other people's ballots.

00:05:52 Speaker_06
— Right, we knew what we were paid to do.

00:05:54 Speaker_12
— I understand you, but you were paid to do something that you knew was wrong.

00:05:58 Speaker_04
— Yes, sir. — Why didn't you ask any questions about what McRae was asking you to do, the lawyer started to say at one point. And Lisa snapped at him.

00:06:11 Speaker_06
— 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, in someone that's your father, that's not going to put you out here to do something illegal.

00:06:24 Speaker_04
I mean… — McRae didn't take the stand. He also declined, very politely, my interview requests.

00:06:34 Speaker_04
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 date for a special election.

00:06:49 Speaker_04
The whole scene made me sad. I felt very human-sized. Meeting up at the Hardee's drive-thru? McRae Dowless was indicted on 13 counts, including perjury, obstruction. He has yet to plead.

00:07:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:07:24 Speaker_04
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.

00:07:36 Speaker_04
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.

00:07:51 Speaker_04
At the request of the state board, she pointed him out.

00:07:54 Speaker_12
Can we get his name, please, for the record?

00:07:58 Speaker_06
This gentleman's name is Horace Munn.

00:08:01 Speaker_12
Are you Mr. Munn? Yes, sir, I am. All right. Thank you, sir.

00:08:05 Speaker_04
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.

00:08:15 Speaker_04
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 McRae were huge political rivals. I knew they couldn't stand each other.

00:08:29 Speaker_04
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.

00:08:39 Speaker_04
People were claiming that the Bladen County Improvement Association had been working with McRae and that they must be cheaters, too.

00:08:46 Speaker_04
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.

00:08:58 Speaker_04
This was about the fraud McCrae'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.

00:09:11 Speaker_10
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 McCray Dallas and organizations such as the Blayton County Improvement Association no longer create any confusion and chaos in our elections.

00:09:28 Speaker_10
Thank you, sir.

00:09:31 Speaker_04
Not long after this all happened, I got a call in the middle of the night.

00:09:36 Speaker_03
Hello, Ms. Chase. Is this Horace?

00:09:41 Speaker_04
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, I did consider it.

00:10:05 Speaker_04
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. Bladen is a rural county in the southeastern part of North Carolina. It's beautiful.

00:10:51 Speaker_04
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 barber shop in Elizabethtown.

00:11:07 Speaker_04
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.

00:11:23 Speaker_04
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.

00:11:33 Speaker_04
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 Blading County, the fight to control the black vote.

00:11:50 Speaker_04
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.

00:12:02 Speaker_04
When I first headed down here after the text from Horace, my questions were simple. Was he in on some kind of conspiracy with McRae? And what did he want to tell me? And I thought that's what I'd be talking about, election corruption or something.

00:12:17 Speaker_04
With 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 talk.

00:12:29 Speaker_04
So I showed up in the tiny town hall of the tiny town of East Arcadia.

00:12:34 Speaker_01
That was in the late 80s, early 90s.

00:12:37 Speaker_04
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.

00:12:48 Speaker_04
The small talk is really hard for me to follow.

00:12:50 Speaker_13
And another person ran. Which office was this? That was the county commissioner. He ran for county commissioner.

00:12:57 Speaker_04
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.

00:13:12 Speaker_04
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 Blading County.

00:13:25 Speaker_04
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.

00:13:37 Speaker_04
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.

00:13:53 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:06 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:18 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:32 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:47 Speaker_04
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.

00:15:05 Speaker_04
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 Blade and Improvement Pack even longer than Horace.

00:15:20 Speaker_04
Cogdale's an intense guy, a fast talker.

00:15:22 Speaker_02
If they don't endorse you, actually meaning if we don't endorse you, we the Bladen Improvement Pack,

00:15:42 Speaker_04
If the PAC doesn't endorse you, you can't win, Cogdale's saying. For years, the PAC has been a powerful force in Bladen politics, because the PAC reliably delivers votes. Black votes.

00:15:53 Speaker_04
Politicians, both white and black, often court the PAC because their endorsement is so valuable. It can swing elections. That's why the Bladen Improvement PAC is coming under attack, Cogdale's saying, because we're too powerful.

00:16:07 Speaker_04
— 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 in Bladen try to paint the pack with the crimes that they themselves are committing.

00:16:22 Speaker_04
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 pack to distract from McCray. He says it's a strategy.

00:16:35 Speaker_03
— 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 Blade Improvement Pack doing elite activities.

00:16:47 Speaker_02
They would keep the heat off of him by putting it on the blade and put it back. And they're doing the same thing again. They made a big shadoo because they did so much publicity on it, they couldn't do nothing with it.

00:16:55 Speaker_04
They made a big shadoo about McCray because they had to. But what they really want to talk about is us, Cogdale's saying. He waves around his big mug of ice.

00:17:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:17:22 Speaker_04
Let me explain something to you, Horace says. Let's go back to 2010. And this is where Horace really pipes up.

00:17:30 Speaker_04
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 in Bladen, and what the Republicans have been up to for the last 10 years here.

00:17:45 Speaker_04
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, Prentiss Benston, elected as the first black sheriff in Blading County's history.

00:17:58 Speaker_04
Horace had just become the president of the PAC, and he had this big plan.

00:18:03 Speaker_03
I knew that it was going to be a hard campaign for him to win. Knowing the breakdown of Blading 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.

00:18:23 Speaker_04
Blading County, around 35,000 people, is about 30 percent black and 60 percent 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.

00:18:39 Speaker_04
So if you're running a black candidate in a countywide race, trying to win a majority of the county, and the majority of the county is white, you'll definitely lose. But Horace thought Prentiss Benston was different.

00:18:51 Speaker_04
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.

00:19:06 Speaker_04
And Prentiss 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.

00:19:17 Speaker_03
It was not really just about being the first black sheriff. Prentice is an outgoing person, a nice person. When it comes to carrying out his duty as a sheriff, he worked in the white communities as well as the black communities.

00:19:35 Speaker_03
When you looked at those who were running, he was the most qualified.

00:19:38 Speaker_04
Prentiss 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.

00:19:52 Speaker_04
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.

00:20:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:20:17 Speaker_04
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, a contract, an off-the-books approval. Stuff like that.

00:20:32 Speaker_04
But Horace was betting that some white people in Bladen, maybe just enough, were feeling like the good old boys system was not working great for them. Like they weren't benefiting. They weren't getting the favors or the passes.

00:20:45 Speaker_04
And a couple of the people it wasn't working for were other sheriff's deputies. White guys who knew Prentiss and ended up throwing themselves into the campaign. One became his campaign manager.

00:20:56 Speaker_04
They'd tell other skeptical white people, Prentiss 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.

00:21:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:21:33 Speaker_04
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.

00:21:49 Speaker_04
By law, there had to be a runoff election between the two highest vote-getters. And the second highest vote-getter was Prentiss Benston. That's where things get super intense in Blading County. Horace was like, oh, we could actually win.

00:22:03 Speaker_04
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.

00:22:16 Speaker_03
When it came to the runoff, You only had one polling site. That was Elizabethtown.

00:22:23 Speaker_04
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 Elizabethtown and back.

00:22:36 Speaker_04
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.

00:22:44 Speaker_03
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 E-town and vote early, it's not going to happen.

00:22:58 Speaker_03
Whereas for people in Dublin, Blaydenborough, 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.

00:23:09 Speaker_04
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.

00:23:22 Speaker_03
This particular night, I was lying there. And about 3 o'clock, 3.30 in the morning, I called Prince. I said, you asleep? He was asleep. I said, wake up. I figured it out. I said, what about Horace? I said, we can win. He said, how? I said, absolute violence.

00:23:46 Speaker_04
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.

00:23:55 Speaker_04
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.

00:24:07 Speaker_04
But 10 years ago, in North Carolina, absentee voting wasn't that common. So Horace had this new idea. And he was amped.

00:24:16 Speaker_04
His dad had been a big part of the Bladen Improvement PAC, 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.

00:24:32 Speaker_04
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.

00:24:39 Speaker_03
In order to do absentee ballots, we had never done it before as an organization. So it's a new adventure. So I actually got a copy of the law governing how to complete an absentee ballot, the legal way. And I took all the information. I studied it.

00:24:58 Speaker_03
And then at my next scheduled meeting at the Blade Improvement, I give a class. And at first, there were some that were questioning it, saying, oh, you have to be sick or out of town. I said, that's not so. That's not the law.

00:25:11 Speaker_04
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.

00:25:21 Speaker_04
He also has this thing where he's always watching out for people trying to trip him up.

00:25:26 Speaker_04
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.

00:25:38 Speaker_04
He's cautious and he's suspicious because he knows people are suspicious of him.

00:25:42 Speaker_03
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 from dealing with this voter election stuff.

00:26:00 Speaker_03
Anytime I involve myself with something, I read the regulations first.

00:26:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:26:13 Speaker_04
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.

00:26:25 Speaker_03
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.

00:26:33 Speaker_04
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.

00:26:46 Speaker_04
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.

00:26:57 Speaker_04
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.

00:27:07 Speaker_03
— 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.

00:27:20 Speaker_04
— 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.

00:27:34 Speaker_04
Eventually, of course, people did notice that the Bladen Improvement PAC was doing something. And apparently that was news.

00:27:42 Speaker_07
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.

00:27:53 Speaker_04
This is a local TV news segment, pretty typical of local news coverage of the pack around that time.

00:27:59 Speaker_04
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.

00:28:11 Speaker_09
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.

00:28:20 Speaker_09
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.

00:28:32 Speaker_07
Instead, the only thing resident Benny Callahan sees this group do is work to influence the outcome of the elections.

00:28:39 Speaker_04
— 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.

00:28:48 Speaker_04
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.

00:28:57 Speaker_07
— 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.

00:29:08 Speaker_09
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.

00:29:20 Speaker_04
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.

00:29:33 Speaker_04
Blayden 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 department.

00:29:47 Speaker_04
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 Prentiss could win, things got bad.

00:30:02 Speaker_05
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.

00:30:20 Speaker_05
So people, were they saying that out in the open?

00:30:25 Speaker_04
How were people making that known? Yeah, they are both. So did people come up to you and say it's your faith?

00:30:32 Speaker_05
— Yes, because they were looking for a reaction, because they wanted to know who I was endorsing.

00:30:36 Speaker_04
— Prentiss 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.

00:30:57 Speaker_04
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.

00:31:09 Speaker_04
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.

00:31:28 Speaker_04
One time, I was sitting with Horace's friend Cogdale. We 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.

00:31:41 Speaker_04
A sheriff is as close as you can get to omniscient in a rumory place like this one.

00:31:46 Speaker_02
You got to understand when you get in certain positions, Zoe, here's what you open up. It's just like this. In my house, I'm the head of my house. When things happen in my house, it comes by me.

00:32:00 Speaker_02
When you 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, ain't no more secrets. — What's that have to do with Prentiss running for sheriff?

00:32:15 Speaker_02
— Everything he had, they didn't want him knowing everything that came through that system.

00:32:18 Speaker_04
— 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.

00:32:27 Speaker_04
That kind of power is not something any Black person in Blading County had ever had before, so far as I can tell.

00:32:34 Speaker_02
— 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.

00:32:55 Speaker_04
The day of the runoff came. There were 17 polling places open. The pack 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.

00:33:09 Speaker_04
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.

00:33:22 Speaker_04
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. Blading County always gathers to watch election returns at the county courthouse.

00:33:36 Speaker_04
And that night it was packed and also silent as the results clicked in. Nearly every black voter cast a vote for Prentiss Benston, plus a few white voters. And Prentiss Benston won by almost 300 votes. Horace's strategy had worked.

00:33:55 Speaker_04
It was the absentee ballots that made the difference. Wanda Monroe, the sheriff's deputy who's in the PAC, she remembers that night.

00:34:03 Speaker_05
— This is strictly opinion. You know that, right? — Yeah. 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.

00:34:31 Speaker_05
They may be too smart for their own good.

00:34:42 Speaker_04
In the days following the election, Horace, who should have been celebrating up and down the county, was upset.

00:34:49 Speaker_03
I felt like it was a highway robbery. I thought they had done Prentiss wrong. I was angry.

00:34:54 Speaker_04
Prentiss's victory was short-lived. Horace had a whole nother problem on his hands. That's after the break. Prentiss Benston had won the runoff for the Democratic primary. He'd beat Eric Bryant.

00:35:23 Speaker_04
And throughout the race, the county government had been saying, whoever won the runoff would be the sheriff. Because in Blading County, the Democratic primary was the election when it came to the sheriff's race.

00:35:35 Speaker_04
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.

00:35:48 Speaker_03
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.

00:35:59 Speaker_04
OK, 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 Prentiss Benston to take office.

00:36:16 Speaker_04
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.

00:36:28 Speaker_04
But what the commissioners don't all account for, apparently, is that Earl Storms is a Prentiss-Benston booster. He'd hired him back when.

00:36:36 Speaker_04
And so Earl Storms' first move as sheriff is to let go of Deputy Eric Bryan, the candidate Prentiss-Benston had just beaten the runoff. And also four other deputies who were Eric Bryant supporters. Poof. Suddenly they were out of jobs.

00:36:50 Speaker_04
Interim Sheriff Storms reportedly posts a memo telling everyone, answer to Prentiss 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.

00:37:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:37:12 Speaker_09
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.

00:37:21 Speaker_04
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.

00:37:37 Speaker_04
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 shadoo all over again. And now, everyone's gathered in the courthouse.

00:37:55 Speaker_00
I'm John Rennelman 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 Prentiss Benchton. Congratulations tonight. How does this sound? Sheriff Prentiss Benchton.

00:38:10 Speaker_11
That sounds good. Certainly, John, it's a great day, a great night for Bladen County, for me.

00:38:16 Speaker_03
Did you know that when Prentiss actually won, I stayed home?

00:38:22 Speaker_04
On the night of the general? Yes. — Why?

00:38:25 Speaker_03
— Stayed home.

00:38:27 Speaker_04
— Horace gets a little starry-eyed when he talks about the victory.

00:38:32 Speaker_03
— I don't think— I would've gotten so emotional if he had left. So I stayed home.

00:38:38 Speaker_04
Yeah. — So what happened when Prentiss called you that night?

00:38:42 Speaker_03
— Oh, I was ecstatic. Oh, I remember it. It's like yesterday.

00:38:46 Speaker_04
— What happened?

00:38:49 Speaker_03
I was jumping for joy. Unbelievable. Dream come true. Hard work and hard work that paid 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.

00:39:09 Speaker_03
That's when I bought the SUV I'm driving.

00:39:12 Speaker_04
The which that you're driving?

00:39:13 Speaker_03
The SUV. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I bought that car after the election. Sure did. Yeah, I remember.

00:39:25 Speaker_04
Winning is so sweet. But this victory is not the point of the story. It's not why Horace is telling it to me.

00:39:33 Speaker_04
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.

00:39:45 Speaker_04
Horace got a visit from a local guy, a guy who worked during the sheriff's race for Prentiss's opponent. This man came to see Horace after the race was over, shook his hand, was like, good game. It was McCray Dowless.

00:39:59 Speaker_03
It was McCray. McCray, once the election was over, he said, Horace, 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.

00:40:15 Speaker_04
How so?

00:40:16 Speaker_03
At the time, he was a Democrat.

00:40:17 Speaker_04
Right.

00:40:18 Speaker_03
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.

00:40:33 Speaker_04
— But, like, what does hang around mean?

00:40:35 Speaker_03
— Uh, come to the Democratic meetings and talk about, congratulate us on our success with the absentee ballot and stuff like that.

00:40:42 Speaker_04
— Horace and McCray shared an obsession with Bleeding 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.

00:40:58 Speaker_04
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.

00:41:10 Speaker_04
That Republican campaign for sheriff ended up working with McCrae Dowless to get out the vote. And how did McCrae get out the vote?

00:41:18 Speaker_04
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. McCrae's involvement is spelled out in court documents, including an affidavit from McCrae.

00:41:32 Speaker_04
Lots of absentee ballots poured in that year. But Prentiss lost. Prentiss' sheriff's term was the shortest in more than 80 years.

00:41:46 Speaker_04
The way Horace sees it, the 2010 sheriff's race in Bladen County began an escalating absentee ballot war between the PAC and McCrae-Dowless that culminated spectacularly in the 2018 congressional scandal, where Bladen County became famous for alleged election cheating.

00:42:04 Speaker_03
So basically what happened was, McCrae decided to take our strategy and use it against us. We were operating within the law. He was operating outside of the law.

00:42:15 Speaker_04
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 Blading County sees it.

00:42:28 Speaker_04
I'd venture to say not even how most people in Blading County see it.

00:42:33 Speaker_08
I don't know who trained who. But if you think Horace Munn is less guilty than McCrae Dallas, you're smoking some strange stuff.

00:42:52 Speaker_04
That's next time on The Improvement Association. 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.

00:43:31 Speaker_04
Knave is our editorial consultant. Fact checking and research by Ben Phelan. Music supervision and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Amy Padula is our associate producer. Ndechubu is the supervising producer. Original music composed by Kwame Brant Pierce.

00:43:47 Speaker_04
Additional support from the staff at This American Life, including Emmanuel Berry, Julie Whitaker, Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, and Frances Swanson.

00:43:55 Speaker_04
At The New York Times, Sam Dolnick, Lauren Jackson, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Alaina Sero, and Nora Keller.

00:44:02 Speaker_04
Special thanks to Tim Tyson, Michael Bitzer, Hakeem Brown, Joe Bruno, Dr. Nyambi Carter, Al Daniels, Herman Dunn, Mark Elias, Steve Lesane, Jens Lutz, Eric Ostermeyer, Kenny Simmons, and Zach St. Louis.

00:44:18 Speaker_04
The Improvement Association is produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times.