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If you know, you have Verbo. From serial productions to the New York Times, this is the Improvement Association. Chapter 2, where's your choice? Being the chair of the Blading 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 crack up, the chair of the elections board was a man named Bobby Lutlam. 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 the local elections guy, McCrae Dallas, had some people working for him, dropping off absentee request forms. In big stacks, every couple of days.
That's not illegal and in Blading 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. One of the workers reported this to Bobby Lutlam, the chairman, and he said, bring me the stack.
I'll look at them. I started going through them, and all of a sudden here's my grandson. And he has absolutely no intention of voting for her. So I called Harley, my grandson.
I said, Harley, did you sign a request for an absentee ballot? And he basically said, what's that? Bobby Lutlam explained to his grandson, Harley, what an absentee ballot request form was. And Harley said, oh, yeah, I remember what happens.
He said that two women came to, he was at his friend's house and they went to pool. And he said, when the lady got out the van, came up and asked him to sign the, they refused to sign him. Did they? She worked for McCrae.
Right. And her last name was Dallas. Jessica Dallas. Jessica.
Yeah. Jessica Dallas is married to a distant relative of McCrae Dallas. She was working for him during the election. The signature on the request form was not Bobby's grandson's signature, but somehow the form had a social security number on it.
So Bobby called the state board of elections, which had already been hearing some things about bleeding county that year. And they sent investigators to bleeding to look into what was happening. The result was the big state board of elections hearing where workers from a crate Dallas testified they'd been paid to pick up people's ballots. Sometimes fill in other people's ballots, which led to indictments.
But the reason I tell you this story is because Bobby Ludlam, Bobby, whose own grandson was a victim of alleged election fraud. Bobby, who was overseeing elections in bleeding county, Bobby thinks McCrae got a raw deal because Bladon Improvement Group has done at least as bad and maybe worse. Bobby thinks the Bladon County Improvement Association and specifically Horace Munn as the head of its political arm, the Bladon Improvement Pack, has been up to election shenanigans for years. So many people in Bladon have said something like this to me.
I asked about the 2018 congressional race and absentee ballots and McCrae Dallas. They'd say, yeah, but what about the other side? The Democrats, they were just as bad, worse, and they've gotten off. But things happened to them.
One day I was in Elizabethtown, the county seat. I was down there reporting on a special election, standing outside the polling place at the gym with a couple TV reporters. And this woman flew up the black at us and just launched into it. I'm sorry, but I'm telling y'all I've had enough of what I've had enough of all praise and s here in this county.
And I'm going to tell you something else. I have reported it every year as a judge that I serve. A poll judge. Yes.
And the records are up there in Raleigh. The records are over there at the board. And let me tell you something that wasn't the Republican Party. That's what I think.
And I don't care if you're typing. Oh, I'm taping you. I told her I had my microphone out. This is Jean Pete, a longtime Republican.
Jean's been pretty upset since McCrae Dallas got in trouble. She's sure McCrae got targeted only because he was working for Republicans when for years Democrats have been doing the same thing. Let me tell you something. There were two people in the election before the last one.
2016. They could have actually brought charges against and didn't. What was that? I'm not kidding.
I'm going to go to the board and get their names. Sorry. I think that was a blade improvement association. Right.
I'm pretty sure that's what they will win. If you really want to do a story on this, we need to sit down and talk and I am doing a lot of my files. I am doing a story on this. So let's talk from serial productions.
I'm Zoe. Geez. This is the improvement association. A true story about election fraud.
When Harris first called me down to North Carolina, he told me Republicans keep accusing the blade improvement pack of cheating in order to deflect scrutiny from the questionable stuff McCrae Dallas has been doing for years here. That's his story. Jane Peat and others in Bladen have a different story that the election cheating in Bladen County began with the Bladen improvement pack that the pack has established a culture of breaking rules in the county that goes on to this day. I wanted to know is that true?
What specifically were people seeing the pack do? So I accept Jane's invitation to come over and check her files. But why did you get a chance to write to all that? Well, not all of it.
I started looking. I was wondering as soon as I arrived, Jane gets right into what she's seen. Her complaints are organized in a folder of papers. She's laid out on her dining room table for me to look through.
When I barging on people like this, looking for something specific, lots of times the rest of their lives are right there too. Right next to us in James living room, the furniture was all pushed back against the wall to accommodate her niece's dialysis machine. Jeans niece on dialysis stayed in James living room while her father was dying. James lost several family members over the last few years, just recently her brother.
She's grieving. Jane admits that grief feels some of her rage right now about local politics. The papers she has out are formal letters that she's written to the county board of elections about problems she's observed. Fewer than I expected, to be honest, but she says a lot of her complaints over the years have taken the form of phone calls.
Some of which she's written are just bullet points. Name and address verification procedure not followed. But it was not required as for help as it stated in the law. Virtually all her complaints are about the pack, the blade and improvement association, which definitely makes its presence known at the polls every local election.
I've seen a few elections here myself at this point. I've seen how the pack works. They always have people outside the main polling place during early voting and on election day under a tent, chatting with voters, handing out a voter guide, offering voter assistance to anyone who needs it. Jane and I spent more than three hours talking through her papers.
Some of them go back 10 years, each incident, which complaint, in detail. And what I get from hearing her walk through them is less of a smoking gun and more a general vibe of coercion or intimidation that Jane sees. Jane thinks the pack, what they're really doing, their presence at the polls. It isn't helping or supporting black voters, it's harassing them, pressuring them into voting a certain way.
Like this story. I wrote about what was going on. Well, I'll just read it to you. Great.
Jane reads from her notes, an incident where she says she saw the harassment in action. She's still mad about it. I was disturbed and I was putting it lightly to see that while I was there working Tuesday through Saturday, all curbside voting was taking place beside the blade and improvement pack tent at the top of the front lawn of the library. This dispute between Jane and the pack workers, it got deep in the weeds, was over where the pack set up its tents outside of polling place.
In North Carolina, voters can vote curbside. If they have trouble walking, for instance, they can just fill out their ballot right in the car. An election worker will bring it out to them and then bring it back inside once they're done. Jane says the pack had set up its tent right next to the space reserved for the curbside voters to park.
Much closer than they're allowed to by law, she says. The cars are pulling up right there. She's moving a coffee mug around the table in front of us to show me how close the pack tent was to the people who were pulling up to the curb to vote. And the people from the tent are having easy access and they're taking it.
The problem was, she says, they were handing out the voter guides too close to where people actually vote. Jane raises this with one of the pack volunteers apparently and he disagrees and they start giving people conflicting directions about where to park their cars for the curbside voting, like warring ballets at a hotel. All the while, she says, pack workers were continuing to hand out the pack's voter guide, which is fine, sort of. You may take their voter guide.
I've actually taken Democrat voter guides. Did I use them? No, because they're not pro-life. But the point of the whole thing is, I might take something from someone and not use it.
That's my choice, or I might use it. Okay, if the tent is here and you're right there within one step, I'm literally one step. Okay, they can see everything you're doing. They can hear every word that's said and somebody comes from your community around there and says, this is what we want you to do.
And they stand right there while you do it or they stick their arm inside the car and help you do it. Where's your choice? You tell me where the choice is. To picture this, when Jane is saying somebody comes from your community, she means the black community, like black voters pulling up in a car and black pack workers coming up to them with a voter guide hovering by the car window while someone's voting, just being too close.
It's pressure. She thinks that could manipulate the voter to vote the pack's way. What's unclear to me with Jane's story though is if that manipulation is what's actually happening. Well, here's what I would say.
That sounds very intimidating if you don't want it. Exactly. And I was going to say this that my husband might would say to you, he had worked for Judge for a good while he said that people of certain community would come in. Okay, now we're switching to something she says her husband saw when he was working as a poll judge, how people from the pack would interact with voters inside the polling place when they provided voter assistance.
Now, voter assistance is a thing at the polls, voters with certain disabilities. For example, they're allowed to have someone help them inside the voting booth. But as Jane's husband saw it, pack members were practically forcing voters to let them help. And there'll be some by following them.
I need to help you vote. All the way in the let me help you vote all the way into the precinct. And the person may or may not agree. But if they disagree, they turn around and say, I don't need you to help me vote.
I need to help you vote. I don't need you to help me vote. Black people. That's what you say.
Pat people. Yeah, Pat people. The pack had them out there help. And they would follow the people into the precinct.
I guess, like I was saying, that sounds very intimidating. Because it is intimidating. If you don't want it, if you don't want it, it's intimidating. The reason I keep saying if you don't want it to Jane is because she's making this obvious lead in these incidents, where she goes from seeing rules possibly being bent or broken to assuming how voters were feeling about what she says was happening, that they were feeling bullied.
Jane thinks what's happening at the polls, the dynamic, is that pack workers intimidate black voters into accepting assistance, whether they need it or not, in order to control how they vote. Even if the voter asks for help, it's not legit to Jane because you can't know if there's social pressure at the network. The way she sees it, voter assistance is more like votes stealing a lot of the time. The person assisting the voter is taking the vote from the voter.
Whatever happened to one man, one vote. That takes that and flushes it down the commode. So you may think, well, that does that look fairly harmless. They wanted that person in there with them, did they?
So of course, later, I looked for complaints about this. Testimony from a voter somewhere, seeing the pack assisted them or harassed them, and they didn't want it. I didn't find anything. Neither have investigators from the state who have also looked for precisely that.
But I think for Jane, the lack of official complaints proves her point. It shows how much control this group is exerting on black voters at the polls. And you know this is human. Human.
This is human stuff. You live in a community. And you're a tight community. Again, she means the black community.
And this whole community is working toward a goal. Say it's a political goal. I don't care what you call it. Working toward a goal.
And you're not going to go along with it. And you're going to have, have many people. Won't you go along with me? Right?
Okay. So there you go. I think this is at the heart of a lot of people's complaints about the bleed improvement pack. Their suspicion of the group.
The idea that the pack keeps black people from making their own choices as voters. So there's the social pressure. But there's also this other possible coercion I heard about. Another theory on how the bleed improvement pack persuades black voters to vote along with the pack.
Something more direct. During my time as a grader, I noticed a lot of things that went on. This is Mary Catherine Meezer. We're on the floor of her living room with her toddlers scooting all around us.
Like Jane, Mary Catherine is an elections person. White works at polling sites. Done that for years. And like Jane, Mary Catherine also has suspicions about the pack.
Mary Catherine told me about one scene she witnessed. It was at a polling place a few years ago. All the candidate signs were clustered out front. The tents were around to shade the campaign workers from the sun.
And she'd see black voters walking by on their way to vote inside. These people were, it was like they were lured into this tent. Okay. And what would happen is, let's say John Doe came up just to vote.
They were given a piece of paper and they would fold it up. And they were, I can't remember if they were lime green or orange, but they stood out. I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is the Bleeding County Improvement Association sample ballot that you're talking about. That was the tent that's all.
The sample ballot. It's the pack's voter guide. It's the same thing Jane Pate saw pack workers giving out. It's made up to look like a real ballot, but it's a different color.
All the little ovals are filled in next to the candidates that the pack is supporting. Pack workers at the polling place try to give a sample ballot to most black voters walking up to vote. Mary Catherine knows the sample ballot is legal. She knows it's allowed.
But the way people were handling it, they take the sample ballot into the voting booth and then when they come out. I noticed that some people would throw theirs away and not turn it back in. And I saw several people go through the trash cans to get those sheets out. Like poll workers for the pack jumping up and rifling through the trash to retrieve the ballots.
They found out they were actually numbered. So they had these things numbered. I'm sorry. I just this moment.
Mary Catherine's toddler Caroline crawled into my lap and somehow found the off button to my recorder. So quick reset. Okay, so people pulling these sample ballots out of the garbage. Right.
They were not turned them back into the tent. Then they were mad. They were like, where's your sheet of paper? These sheets paper were numbered.
So they knew which one was missing and who had it and where to find it. I will not say 100% but I will say pretty confident that there was something wrapped in the paper. Like what? Oh, money?
I'm not 100% but there was something that enticed them to go in there and follow the procedures. She's a take. She suspects the pack may be paying people for their votes. So things like that go on outside the polling place.
And the more you sit out there and just look, the more you see. So I do go out there to see for myself. Watch the pack in action. And I see what's making these white people so suspicious.
And I think I know why. That's after the break. I'm still hanging around. I'm still trying to get my interviews.
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I almost forgot to mention the best part, Amy. Free access to the athletics world cup coverage in our app. Download the athletic app and see that. I'm sitting in a truck outside of Pulling Place with Coddail.
George Michael Coddail goes by Coddail. A long time pack member. Coddail's been on the county commission for eight years, and he's running this year to keep his seat. We're in the truck, we have the cold, and I'm trying to ask him about the pack.
But his voters come up to vote. Coddail keeps leaping out of the car to talk to them. And he hand them one of the pack's sample ballots. Then he gets right back in the truck and continues the conversation as though he never liked.
That's the time to stand. That's the time to be there. That's the time to stand. That's the time to stand.
That's the time to look there. For a while, it's like this. He's out. I got the chair to make things in.
See, that's the thing with him saying. When they come here. I'm out here at this Pulling Place because I want to check out how the pack operates. And do I see the kind of stuff that Jean-Paid and Mary Catherine were sure they were seeing.
I didn't think I was going to witness money changing hands out here or something, like out in the open in front of a reporter. No. And I do not. Hey!
But I'm watching out the window. Every time Coddail goes out and I get right away, that for people who are suspicious of the pack, the way Coddail and other pack people handle the sample ballot could confirm their suspicions. That's something not right. Coddail only approaches black voters.
He goes straight up to them, gets close. He's clutching something secret-seeming, tight and spiced. He hands the sample ballot over, a little surreptitiously, a quick hand-to-hand pass, like a note in school. And then I see the voters take the cue and also treat it surreptitiously.
Folding it into a square, slipping it into a pocket, taking it inside, and then doing a hand-to-hand pass right back to the pack workers once they come out of a polling place. Finally, I jump out of the car, too. I want to know what they're saying. So I follow Coddail over to a voter, an older black guy in a nice suit.
Coddail's tall, kind of floppy, he often towers over people when they talk. He compliments the voter on his smart-looking hat, then unfolds the ballot-shaped purple sheet of paper. What do you got there? The voter says, democratic ticket?
Yeah, Coddail says. I'm not going to tell you what to do. Coddail starts pointing out names on the ballot. The people of the pack is endorsed.
So here we go, that's Joseph Biden. Coddail says, he points down the road to district attorney, and the Senate race, that's a black young lady, Erica. That's a white guy, Cunningham. That's a black young lady, Erica.
That's a black guy, Cunningham. And so on, all the way down the purple ballot. This candidate lives over on Chicken Foot Road, that candidate's been there forever. She's a white lady, she's fine.
Then you got Albuquerque. That's a black lolly. And that's Martin Dennen, now he ran last time. Coddail flips over the sheet of purple paper, points to the county commissioner's race.
The race Coddail himself is running in. Then on the back backhand, that's me. Now if you want to take that in, you can take it in and use it, how do you want to deal with it? Now if you want to take that in, you can take that in and use it, however you want to deal with it.
Your ballot's going to look just like this. The only thing about it, when you turn it, when you go in there, you want to be white, on the white sheet of paper. Well look, just like that. Now if you want to take that, we can take it on the image.
Okay. And we get, now you got to do this, open it up, and look at what you got. And when you get to do it, let me get that back when you get ready. I win.
I'll show you that in that race. Get your candy rubbers. I'm the middle boy. Rubbers, I'm the middle boy.
I hope you can give me a vote. I hope you can give me a vote. If you can. I've watched Coddail give the same spiel a few times now.
And that is always how these exchanges end with those three elements. Please vote for me. Don't I know someone you're related to? And be sure to give the sample ballot back when you're done.
It did not see anyone throw away their sample ballot or see pack workers scrounge around in the trash for it, like Mary Catherine described. It definitely saw voters give the ballot right back after voting, like Coddail asked. It's true that the pack workers and the voters are very precious about it, like it's a classified document. And it looks weird, but there's a clear explanation.
If we don't pick them up, they're compromised. Back in the pack's headquarters, the concrete equity building, Horace Munn, the pack president, tells me that a fundamental part of running this pack is tightly guarding the sample ballot. Horace says he's seen people steal the pack's ballot and use it against them. Someone else take a ballot.
They go and burn a copy. You just see them in color paper and start each amount of minorities. Like this is from the black pack that you support, but actually it's not really. Horace says in 2010 when he took over, people were putting out fake copies of the Blaine Improvement Pack ballot to mislead pack voters.
Black voters. We take guys in the organization that were polluting with the rights and come in and get information and we get a copy of the ballot and actually change the ballot when I first started. That's why I changed the concept in the process. Horace says over the years he's seen a few fakes, so now he keeps extra vigilance over these ballots.
I don't give up the ballots. I only give them to the pollers. And the ballots are, you want to do a color that ought to be stark, then a certain color. The writing on is done meticulously.
And I thought I'd cover my eyes as we scholars. Always on the day of election, it's never the same color we use for a voting. Never. Talking to Horace about the sample ballot, I'm like, oh, there's an entire circle of suspicion going on.
Horace thinks there are people in Blaine who are actively out to get him and his pack. Like that his opponents, white people, mainly, are going to mess with the sample ballot because they have before. So the pack workers and voters treat the sample ballot secretively. That then looks especially suspicious to white people who are already on the lookout for suspicious activity by the pack.
The suspicion on the one side increases the suspicion on the other. As for voter assistance or the pack coercing or intimidating black voters, like what Jane Peat told me about, I didn't see any evidence of that either. I've been in Blaine for three elections now, and over the days I spent at the polling sites, I only saw one voter ever request assistance from the pack. And once I saw a pack worker offer it and get a polite no thanks in return.
I didn't see anything like what Jane described to me, the crowding up on voters, trying to get into the voting booth with them. Obviously it's hard for me, an outsider, white reporter, to say whether or not black voters felt social pressure to vote the way the pack wants to vote. But I've talked with a fair number of black voters in Blaine and not everyone likes the pack, but no one ever told me they felt forced into voting with the pack. Instead, what I saw over the course of three elections in Blaine County is that a lot of black voters in Blaine want to vote the same way, to vote with one voice.
And there's a reason for that, of course. It has been challenging here, Blaine County. It's a challenging county. Chagdale and I were talking again and was struck during a slow period at the polls.
I was asking him how he came to join the Improvement Association. Something I love about Chagdale is he will give the longest answer possible to win question, like someone taking the absolute longest route possible to get to a destination. Not to torture the analogy, but it's like at the end of these long journeys of answers, you get to see the whole place. Keep in mind, my question was, how did you join the association?
And when I came here, certain things there, how to see it. Certain things that were done here. I had sent it done years ago. Things like getting groceries on craves on grocery store.
That was something that I thought that had died. But they were hearing this error doing that. You follow what I'm saying? Well, what's the big deal about getting credit?
No, this thing, it was something people used to do. You got to understand. It used to be where people were shutcrops and worked. That's how they brought the food.
So you saw that and you were like, people are basically a sharecropping situation. It was something done. They were working, they go get the food on craves. The man would say, you go get all you want to eat, and he would put it on the beer.
And that was the way of keeping you and getting it to him all the time. I couldn't understand because the prices were so damn elevated. Why would you go? I understand that it's not how you would like to live your life.
But it seems like you were worried that other people were living there like that. I was saying, and then he'd understand being in the kind of ghost shop of the store. Why are you going to go buy a piece of meat and pay five dollars for it? Because you get on credit and think that's something good.
And you go get the same piece of meat from the downwind food, and have it to not be the same. But then kind of find out the reason they were doing it. They had done got so in debt to this man, so they could never get enough money to do it. Because all their money went to him.
And so what did that have to do with the association? Those were the kind of things that we were proud to change. At the time, this was before the pack was formed. Almost the entire county government was white.
County Commissioners, school board, overwhelmingly white, and had been pretty much ever since the end of Reconstruction. And it's not that black candidates wouldn't run. It's that they could almost never win. I learned this political science term while reporting this story, which is racially polarized voting, and it perfectly describes the politics of Blading County in the existence of the pack.
It means what it sounds like voting is divided along racial lines, white voters vote for white candidates, black voters prefer to vote for black, but it's not always an option. Also, white voters won't even vote for white candidates that are supported by black people. This was precisely the scenario in Blading County when Cogdale got there. The study done in the mid-80s found that racially polarized voting was persistent and severe in Blading County.
And because of Blading's racial demographics, back then, about 60% white, 39% black, majority ruled every time. A black candidate could get 90% of the black vote, and still have no chance of winning. This was how it was until 1987, when a change in the Voting Rights Act made it possible for a few black leaders in Blading to sue the county, alleging their vote was utterly diluted. Black voters could not pick a candidate of their choice.
All over the state, county by county, black leaders in North Carolina were filing lawsuits just like this. Laid in county, fought any changes especially hard, and then, maybe noticing the tide of history was moving against them abruptly settled. And the elections in Blading changed, radically. The county was cut into three districts, with different racial makeups, one being majority black, and this allowed black voters the chance to get some representation in the county.
Under the new system, black voters are usually able to elect a third of the seats for governing bodies, like the county commissioner of the school board. If, and only if, black voters in Blading did one thing, persistently and severely. If you get your people to vote in what they call a block. Voted together as a black, with one voice.
If they stuck together, they could get three county commissioners at the top of the county. That is why the Blading Improvement Pack formed. It was created in the wake of that lawsuit to organize black voters and get those seats, if they could. And now, the black vote is a player in just about every election in Blading, because of the back, and its sample ballot.
Every election, Blading Improvement gets as many people as possible to vote along the same lines, for a black candidate or for the candidate who best represents black interests. This requires a sometimes unforgiving discipline from the back. Around this cardinal rule, don't split the black vote. No competition among black candidates.
Cogill tells me, if you're not on the pack's sample ballot and you're black, you shouldn't be running. Period. You know if you go out there, fled the market, and you're going to have problems. You see what I'm saying?
It is the way it is. You can't win. You can't have too many black people running for the same seat, because then it'll dilute the power of the black. You'll lose every time.
If black voters don't vote together, if they split over two different black candidates, say, a white candidate could run up the middle and capture the seat. That's the reason why sometimes I think the pack gets a name, because we ally together, and we cry and keep it up a system block. We don't debate Trump a lot. The way the pack runs is pretty tight, and not open to criticism, because the piece of turf they've managed to carve out is small, and the stakes are high.
I don't mean to sound like the pack does something unusual or exotic. Holding an interest group together with discipline is literally politics. Knowing the specific history of the pack in this county did help me understand the precarious position the pack holds in blatant politics, and why they're so urgent about getting black voters here to vote together. Although history, of course, is open to interpretation.
I know the history, and I know that it took years to overcome all that stuff. When I was in Jean Pete's dining room, talking with her about why she thinks the pack is cheating, she brought up history too. I believe with all my heart, this whole problem had its seeds in what happened in North Carolina in the far past with Jim Crow laws, and then everybody's trying to make up for it, because they realize all that stuff is wrong. And then you got the 60s happening, and now everybody's trying to treat people right, and I'm talking about most of the people in this county, I believe I can say this and be right, will raise to respect everybody.
It didn't matter your color. Now, there were laws on the books that allowed certain businesses to do certain things. Like discriminate against black people. And so I think in an effort to not hurt anybody or push back against people that were trying to make their place in the world, and gain respect and everything, a lot of things were bling that, that were illegal in this voting stuff is what I'm saying.
Jean's feeling is the people who work at the polls in Blading County are over correcting for all of the sins of the past, the voter suppression by whites against blacks. They're not holding the black political group here accountable for the ways they're breaking the rules. Nobody had the intestinal fortitude to try to change anything, because they didn't want to be called bigots. They wouldn't be told they were trying to impede the vote and all that kind of mess.
There's a history of voter suppression of black people in North Carolina. And so you think that sometimes people were just letting things slide because they were afraid that they were replicating that history. The history of voter suppression, I know there was because after Reconstruction, and the Northern Army went on back to where they came from, there was people who, there were black people who had offices, had been elected, and they would run out of town, and they would not run out of town in a kind of manner either. Jean is referring to a particularly violent period of time for black Americans in the South after Reconstruction.
Jean lives only about an hour from Wilmington, North Carolina, where the Wilmington Massacre, the white supremacist coup, took place in 1898, overthrowing elected black leaders. Wait supremacy was the coup leader's actual slogan. Wait people with guns rampaged through the city. Many people were killed.
Black politicians, businessmen, journalists were banished from the city. Soon after, state legislators changed the voting laws, ushering in the era of Jim Crow, which essentially stopped black people from voting for the next 65 years or so. I don't know precisely how much Jane knows about what happened specifically in 1898 down here, but she has the gist of it, and she has her view about how that history is history. But I'm only speaking from my lifetime.
That's all I can talk about. Only thing I have absorbed is my lifetime. When I was at the polls working, everybody was coming to vote. My black friends were coming to vote.
My white friends were coming to vote. My Hispanic friends were coming to vote. Nobody was telling them they couldn't vote. Nobody was getting in their way to vote.
And so it never occurred to me to think, oh, we got voter suppression. So I'm not too sure if it was who was doing it during my lifetime. Who was doing it? I know there's a history back there.
I know it is. Hey, people, we haven't moved on. We need to move on. Start trusting each other and quit fighting.
What is the deal? Everybody just go vote. When Jane talks about voter suppression, what it is, it's very literal. Almost like if there's not a big, burly guy at the polls, hurling people into bushes who are trying to vote, then no one's being prevented from voting.
But of course, there are other ways to prevent people from voting. It can be done with laws and procedures, something like having only one polling place in Elizabethtown far from where a majority of black people in the county live. That's something that could keep a significant number of black people from voting without anyone having to get in anyone's face at the polls. Right now, as I speak these words, there are a slew of state legislatures working on new voting bills that make it harder to vote.
These laws are being talked about so much right now. Some of the changes being proposed, cutting back on early voting days, not letting voters vote out of precinct, requiring certain kinds of ID to vote. A bunch more stuff like that that all add up to making voting trickier. So many elections experts have said these laws are a little more than voter suppression, targeting black voters specifically.
Jean and I didn't talk about that stuff, though. Mainly because sitting at her dining room table with all her files laid out in front of me, I was still struggling to understand what exactly was her evidence that the Blaine Improvement Association PAC cheats. Arguments about parking spaces at curbside voting insinuations that black voters are being somehow controlled by the PAC. It's not evidence.
It's just suspicion. But no matter, because I think a lot of people in Blaine County think black people are getting a pass now because of past wrongs. Or they see the PAC motivating large numbers of black people to act in unison and it just looks fishy to them. Whatever the reason, they're just so ready to believe the PAC is cheating.
And that creates an environment where any one of the many accusations that are thrown at the PAC can take hold and grow. And even, provably, false accusation can be turned into a powerful weapon and be used to tactical advantage by their enemies. That's next time I'm improving the association. The Improvement Association is produced and edited by Nancy Uptake and me.
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