Zoe talks to people in the county who believe the Bladen Improvement PAC has been cheating for years. She tries to get beyond the rumors and into specifics, and comes face to face with the intense suspicion and scrutiny leveled against the organization. In the middle of another election, Zoe goes out with members of the PAC to watch how they operate and try to make sense of all these allegations against them.
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From Cereal Productions and the New York Times, this is the improvement Association.
Chapter 2 Where's your choice?
Being the chair of the Bladen County Board of Elections is a pretty intense job in a place where accusations of election fraud are as common as American flags.
All the accusations come to the board and then they have to sort out what to go after.
And what's just election noise in 2018, the year of the big Congressional race crackup, the chair of the Elections board was a man named Bobby Ludlum.
Republican white guy.
He'd served on the Board of Elections for years, and during early voting that year, Bobby noticed something unusual was happening with absentee ballot request forms.
Bladen always saw an unusually high number of absentee ballot requests come in, and Bobby knew that that a local elections guy, McCray Dowlas, had some people working for him dropping off absentee request forms in big stacks every couple days.
That's not illegal.
And in Bladen county, not that weird.
But one day workers at the Board of Elections were going through this pile of request forms and came across this one absentee ballot request for the 94 year old mother in law of someone who worked at the Board of Elections, a person they knew did not vote.