From serial productions and The New York Times, this is the Improvement Association.

Chapter 3. The Ballad of the Nursing Home Ballots.

I've been talking to Horace for two years or more.

Unlike any relationship that goes through its warmer periods and it's colder ones,

Horace is moody. Sometimes he's expansive, beginning his answers with,

here's what you have to understand about blading county. Sometimes he seems resentful and

answers me short. Where's evidence? In this one conversation, I was telling Horace that

a lot of people, Republicans, whenever I'd bring up the cheating accusations against McRae

Dowless, their rebuttal was usually whatever McRae might have done, the blatant pack had been

doing it way longer and worse. Okay, now, if that's their defense, where is the evidence?

Because, oh, the evidence is, we're black and they're white, if you're white you're right.

That's bullshit. Where is the evidence?

This conversation Horace was particularly testy with me because I was asking about a particularly

persistent allegation. Different from the other stuff I'd heard, bigger. It had to do with

absentee ballots from residents in a nursing home. That the pack had somehow stolen votes

from vulnerable black voters there. Well, they talk about these nursing home ballots. That's a lie.

That's all a lie. Where are they? I don't know. I don't know. I've been trying to

find out where are they. I don't know. It sound like that a little desperate because I've been

trying to hunt down these ballots for months. For some people in Blading County, white Republicans,

mainly, these nursing home ballots are their origin story for how Blading County became infamous.

Why it became the National Posture Child for Election fraud. All over Blading County,

if you ask, who's really been cheating in elections here? Where did this all begin?

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