The Improvement Association · Serial Productions & The New York Times

Chapter One: ‘The Big Shadoo’

April 13, 2021·45 min·3 clips

A young woman who met ballot operative McRae Dallas at a Hardee's drive-thru cried on the stand while explaining he reminded her of her father.

The episode opens with reporter Zoe Chace describing the 2018 North Carolina congressional race, in which Republican Mark Harris appeared to win by 905 votes but was undone by suspicious absentee ballot numbers in Bladen County. Voters reported ballots taken from their homes, never submitted to the Board of Elections, filled out by strangers, and signed with forged signatures. At the resulting state hearing, workers for operative McRae Dallas testified under evident emotional distress. Kelly Hendricks, who met Dallas at the Hardee's drive-thru where she worked, cried while recounting how he reminded her of her father before she began illegally picking up ballots for him. Dallas's stepdaughter Lisa Britt testified she had physically filled in ballots for other voters — illegal everywhere in the United States. Dallas himself never testified and declined interview requests. Mark Harris ultimately stepped aside and called for a new election. Chace explains that her interest in the case began when Dallas's name surfaced from a previous Bladen County story she had reported, and that her attention sharpened when Horace Munn's name appeared briefly in the hearing testimony. Chace knew Munn as the head of the Bladen Improvement PAC, a Black Democratic political organization, and found it strange that his name was being associated with the Republican fraud operation. The state board's closing remarks lumped the PAC together with Dallas as problematic actors, which Chace found puzzling. After Horace texted her asking if she would write about Bladen County, she took him up on it. The episode then shifts to Bladen County itself, described as rural, beautiful, and face-to-face in its culture. Horace introduces Chace to a group of PAC members including longtime member Cogdale. The group's main message: Republicans have been cheating in Bladen County elections for years and have been framing the PAC to deflect scrutiny from their own activities. To explain why, Horace takes Chace back to 2010 and the campaign to elect Prentice Benston as the first Black sheriff in Bladen County history. Benston was a 22-year sheriff's deputy with a business degree and crossover appeal, running in a county where the Democratic primary was effectively the general election for local offices. The main obstacle was the good-ol'-boy system that had kept the county government almost entirely white. Horace's key insight was structural: a single runoff polling place in Elizabethtown put the predominantly Black southern part of the county at a transportation disadvantage. At 3:30 a.m., struck with insomnia, Horace called Benston with a plan: absentee ballots as a mass get-out-the-vote tool, something unprecedented for the PAC. He studied the statutes and trained workers to do it legally, deploying them in small batches to avoid alerting the Board of Elections. Benston won by almost 300 votes; the absentee ballots made the difference. Cogdale provides important context: the sheriff holds the knowledge of every embarrassing secret, crime, and scandal in a small county, and white residents did not want a Black man in that position. The victory was brief. White county commissioners delayed seating Benston, appointed an interim sheriff, and helped get an independent candidate on the ballot for the general election. Benston ultimately prevailed in November and Horace, who stayed home to avoid emotion, bought himself an SUV in celebration. But the story's point, Horace insists, is what came next: McRae Dallas, who had worked against Benston, came by to congratulate Horace and the two began a friendship. Dallas attended Democratic meetings and learned the PAC's absentee ballot method. Four years later, working for Republicans, Dallas used nearly the same strategy — and Benston lost his reelection bid. The 2010 sheriff's race is Horace's origin story for everything that followed, including the 2018 congressional fraud.

As heard by us

A slow-burn county politics story that turns an agreed-upon fraud case into a study of local power.

This episode lands most strongly when it stays rooted in Bladen County and the local politics tied to the 2018 North Carolina election-fraud case that Republicans and Democrats agree happened.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the county politics behind a rare election-fraud case.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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