The Improvement Association - Ep. 2
Serial
Serial Productions & The New York Times
4.5 • 82.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | These first two episodes of the Improvement Association are free. |
| 0:06.8 | But to hear the whole series, you'll need to subscribe to the New York Times, |
| 0:10.6 | where you'll get access to all the serial productions and New York Times shows. |
| 0:14.8 | And it's super easy. |
| 0:16.3 | You can sign up through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. |
| 0:19.4 | And if you're already a time subscriber, just link your account and you're done. |
| 0:25.6 | From Serial Productions in the New York Times, this is the Improvement Association. |
| 0:32.1 | Chapter 2. Where's Your Choice? |
| 0:37.0 | Being the chair of the Blading County Board of Elections is a pretty intense job, |
| 0:42.0 | in a place where accusations of election fraud are as common as American flags. |
| 0:46.7 | All the accusations come to the board, and then they have to sort out what to go after |
| 0:50.9 | and what's just election noise. |
| 0:53.5 | In 2018, the year of the big congressional race crackup, the chair of the elections board |
| 0:59.0 | was a man named Bobby Ludlam. |
| 1:01.4 | Republican, white guy, he'd served on the board of elections for years. |
| 1:06.1 | And during early voting, that year, Bobby noticed something unusual was happening with |
| 1:10.7 | absentee ballot request forms. |
| 1:13.6 | Bladen always saw an unusually high number of absentee ballot requests come in. |
| 1:18.3 | And Bobby knew that a local elections guy, McCrae, Dallas, had some people working for him, |
| 1:23.9 | dropping off absentee request forms in big stacks every couple days. That's not illegal, |
| 1:29.7 | and in Blading County, not that weird. But one day, workers at the Board of Elections were going |
| 1:36.5 | through this pile of request forms and came across this one absentee ballot request for the 94-year-old |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Serial Productions & The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Serial Productions & The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

