The Intercept

FOR MORE THAN two decades, the Bladen County Improvement Association has campaigned for the interests of the black community in its poor, heavily rural county in southeastern North Carolina. In addition to speaking out for fair housing and against discrimination, the group’s political arm, which leans Democratic, assists and encourages people to vote in an area where access to polls has had a fraught history, according to its political action committee president, Horace Munn.

“A lot of our voters in Bladen County are afraid to go to the polls and a lot of elderly voters can’t get to the polls,” Munn said. “So if they have an absentee ballot we assist with that, or, for early voting, we’ll assist by bringing them to the polls to vote.”

For its entire existence, Munn’s group has worked in almost total obscurity, having rarely received attention outside the state’s sparsely populated southeastern edge. Yet last week that suddenly changed, as Munn’s group found itself the unlikely center of thunderous accusations from the state’s embattled Republican governor.

Falling behind his Democratic rival in a razor-thin margin after the November 8 election, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory took a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook and launched a vigorous campaign to cast doubt on the results of his state’s election by alleging pervasive voter fraud perpetrated by minority-focused voting groups.

In this effort, McCrory made dire — and highly public — accusations against black voting activists in Bladen County, although no formal investigation into the group has been completed. In a statement posted to the governor’s website November 15, McCrory alleged that Munn’s group had orchestrated “a massive voter fraud scheme” so large as to call the entire state election into question.

“The staggering evidence of voter fraud in Bladen County,” an attorney for the Pat McCrory Committee Legal Defense Fund said in a statement, “and the number of similar PACs that the North Carolina Democratic Party donated to shortly before the start of early vote requires close examination throughout the state.”

In the following days, it was reported that McCrory’s campaign had lodged complaints against 11 other Democratic get-out-the-vote groups in the state mostly focused on outreach among African-American voters. Facing questions about whether Republicans were targeting minority communities, a spokesperson for the governor doubled down on the accusations, asserting that “we didn’t pick the places the Democrats seem to have chosen to commit voter fraud.”

McCrory’s vote protests have since spread to roughly half the state’s counties, and yesterday, he cited pervasive election rigging in demanding a statewide recount. Given the closeness of the race, his charges of fraud carry high stakes.

Liberal observers see McCrory’s invocation of election fraud as an attempt to steal a seat that he’s on the cusp of losing. If the governor succeeds in having the election deemed sufficiently contested, the results could be turned over to the Republican-dominated legislature, which could simply hand the governorship to McCrory, even if he remains behind in the popular vote.

And whether or not McCrory prevails in his quest to retake his governor’s seat, his accusations against voters in black communities could have lasting effects. Having been cast as a criminal enterprise by the state’s most powerful politician, Munn’s group is facing the prospect of a prolonged, Republican-backed voter fraud inquiry into its work.