The Improvement Association · Serial Productions & The New York Times

Chapter Two: ‘Where Is Your Choice?’

April 15, 2021·46 min·4 clips

A county elections chair found his own grandson's signature forged on an absentee ballot request — but still thinks the other side cheated worse.

The episode opens with Bobby Ludlam, the Republican chair of the Bladen County Board of Elections, discovering that his own grandson's name appeared on a forged absentee ballot request form — yet Ludlam still believes the Bladen Improvement PAC has been doing worse for years. This sets up the episode's central paradox: even people victimized by alleged Republican operative McRae Dallas's ballot operation think the Democratic-aligned PAC got a pass. Reporter Zoe Chace then visits Jane Pate, a longtime Republican poll worker who has filed formal complaints about the PAC for a decade. Jane's complaints center on PAC workers positioning their tent too close to curbside voting spaces, approaching voters with sample ballots, and allegedly following voters into the polling place to provide unwanted assistance. Chace listens carefully but notes that Jane makes a recurring inferential leap — from observing PAC behavior to assuming voters felt coerced. Mary Catherine Mazur, another white elections worker, adds a more explosive accusation: that numbered sample ballots were handed out with something wrapped inside them, suggesting vote-buying. Chace then observes PAC member Cogdale distributing the purple sample ballots at a polling place and sees exactly what the accusers describe — but also a clear, non-sinister explanation. Cogdale walks each Black voter through every race on the ballot, asks for their vote for himself, and requests the ballot back when they leave. Chace follows up with PAC president Horace Munn, who explains the numbered ballot system as a defense against counterfeit ballots that opponents have used in the past to mislead Black voters. Munn describes a history of white operatives infiltrating and sabotaging the PAC's materials. Chace then provides the structural context: a 1980s study confirmed racially polarized voting so severe in Bladen County that Black candidates with near-unanimous Black support still lost in a 60-percent-white county. A 1987 Voting Rights Act change enabled a lawsuit that eventually redistricted the county into majority-minority districts, allowing Black voters representation for the first time since Reconstruction — but only if they voted in a disciplined bloc. This is the entire reason the PAC exists and why it operates with what critics call unforgiving discipline around its sample ballot. Cogdale recounts arriving in Bladen and seeing Black residents still buying groceries on credit from white store owners, perpetuating debt bondage that mirrored sharecropping. The PAC's deeper mission, he says, was economic as well as political independence. Chace also visits with Jane to discuss the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, a violent white supremacist coup that overthrew elected Black leaders and ushered in six decades of Jim Crow voting restrictions. Jane acknowledges the history but draws a line at her own lifetime: if she didn't personally see suppression, it doesn't apply. Chace quietly notes that structural suppression — like having a single polling place far from Black communities — doesn't require a visible enforcer. She also references contemporary state-level legislation restricting early voting and requiring voter ID, which election experts describe as targeted voter suppression. The episode concludes that the mutual suspicion between PAC supporters and white accusers is self-reinforcing: the PAC's secretive ballot-handling, born from real historical sabotage, looks sinister to people already primed to believe it, creating an environment where even false accusations can gain traction.

As heard by us

Election drama moves from paperwork into a murkier test of trust.

This episode follows a county elections board into the messier side of voting, where absentee ballot request forms, campaign pressure, numbered sample ballots, and the thin line between help and manipulation all sit in the same frame.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want election reporting that follows absentee-ballot forms and polling-place details into the field, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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