From Serial Productions in 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 and like any relationship that goes through its warmer periods and its 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 is the evidence? In this one conversation, I was telling Horace that a lot of people, Republicans, whenever I'd bring up the cheating accusations against McCray Dowless.

Their rebuttal was usually whatever McCray might have done, the Blade and

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, Horst 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 PAC had somehow stolen votes from vulnerable black voters there.

Well, they talk about these nursing homes. votes from vulnerable black voters there.

Well, they talk about these nursing home ballots from 2010.

That's all a lie.

Where are they?

I don't know. I don't know. I've been trying to... Where are they? I don't know.

I sound like that, a little desperate, because I've been trying to hunt down these ballots for months.

For some people in Blayden County, white Republicans mainly,

these nursing home ballots are their origin story for how Blayden County became infamous, why it became

...