Serial Productions & The New York Times
8 episodes listed below
Election suspicion, county by county.
The Improvement Association follows Bladen County, North Carolina, where one confirmed ballot scandal left behind a mess of older accusations. The series tests local claims against interviews, election history, racial politics, and the stubborn feeling that everyone is telling only part of the story.
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The Improvement Association is a tightly reported series about election suspicion in Bladen County, North Carolina. It begins with a rare fact in American politics: a congressional election was thrown out after absentee ballot fraud. That would be enough for most stories. Here, it is only the doorway. The series follows the older, murkier accusations that have attached themselves to the Bladen County Improvement Association, a Black advocacy group whose opponents have long accused it of bullying voters, tampering with ballots, and stealing votes. The reporting does not treat those charges as settled truth. It keeps asking where the evidence is. That question leads into county boardrooms, early-voting sites, nursing home ballot stories, sample ballot disputes, and old Democratic primary fights. The politics are local, but the stakes are not small. Bladen County becomes a map of how fraud claims form, harden, and get passed around until they feel like common knowledge. Horace, the PAC president, is central to that world: strategic, suspicious, certain about some things, and challenged by people who see the county differently. Cogdell's commissioner race shows how alliances can become tests of loyalty. Minnie Price complicates the story further, pushing back against Horace and Cogdell while carrying her own political weight. The series also spends time with officials and observers trying to separate legal organizing from coercion, sloppy procedure from corruption, and rumor from proof. That distinction matters. It is also hard to hold onto in a county where race, party, family history, and personal grievance keep crossing wires. The show works because it stays close to the texture of the place. A numbered handout, a missing ballot, a candidate photo, or a comment at a debate can suddenly carry years of meaning. The tone is skeptical without becoming smug. It gives people room to talk, then checks what their stories can actually support. For listeners used to national election coverage, this series offers something more intimate and more uncomfortable: a county-level look at how democracy can be strained by both real wrongdoing and endless accusation.
Made for: For listeners who want reported political storytelling rooted in documents, interviews, and local history. It suits people interested in election integrity, Southern politics, racial power, and the difference between allegation and proof.
What sets it apart: Rather than treating election fraud as an abstract national argument, the series stays inside one county and follows the claims person by person. Its power comes from the friction between verified wrongdoing, unproven accusations, and the local memories that keep both alive.
For at least a decade, allegations of cheating have swirled around elections in rural Bladen County, N.C. Some people in town point fingers at a Black advocacy group, the Bladen County Improvement Association, accusing it of bullying voters, tampering with ballots and stealing votes outright. These accusations have never been substantiated, but they persist. 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...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A patient election investigation that makes local power, racial division, and the consequences of unproven allegations unusually legible.
The Improvement Association turns a disputed election story in Bladen County, North Carolina, into a close study of how political power works in a small community.
A discarded sample ballot becomes your tiny crime scene, with every easy assumption held outside.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A county race where representation, power, and cover are argued out in public.
The episode gets its strongest material from the county commissioner's race, not the presidential primary, which barely seems to register in Blading County, North Carolina.
A rerun election where grudges, race, and power keep shaping the same political fight.
The piece follows the August 2019 do-over congressional election and keeps its focus on the fallout from the absentee-ballot cheating scandal.
Ballot fraud claims and race collide in a case that resists easy certainty.
The episode turns a fight over absentee ballots in Bladen County into something larger: a close look at race and at who gets believed when accusations start flying.
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.
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.
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The Improvement Association settles into Blading County during the February 2020 Democratic primary.
The race is back in August 2019, after the cheating scandal forced a congressional do-over.
Horace and the narrator return to Bladen County's fight over absentee ballots.
Chapter Two of The Improvement Association investigates allegations that the Bladen County Improvement PAC, a Black political organization, engages in voter intimidation and fraud — claims made loudest by white Republican poll workers who believe the PAC has long escaped accountability.
Chapter One of The Improvement Association traces how a 2018 North Carolina congressional election became the only one in 80 years thrown out for fraud — and how that scandal connects to a 2010 sheriff's race in Bladen County.
This trailer introduces 'The Improvement Association,' an investigative podcast exploring election fraud allegations in Bladen County, North Carolina.