ProPublica announced Wednesday that Jen Fifield has been hired as a voting reporter for the next two years. She was most recently a senior reporter at Votebeat.org, where she covered elections, voting and threats to democracy in Arizona, and contributed to the newsroom’s national coverage.
With a colleague, Fifield revealed last year how Arizona’s unique law requiring proof of citizenship is disproportionately disenfranchising certain groups of eligible voters. Her work has often spurred state and local officials to act in ways that have protected voters. One Arizona county, for example, added more oversight to elections after her investigation uncovered that its elections director botched the midterm results and then fled. And after she revealed in another story that a rural red county planned to try to hand-count midterm ballots, the attorney general threatened legal action, leading the county officials to reject the proposal.
Before Votebeat, Fifield worked at The Arizona Republic revealing how the companies hired for the partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots were connected to Donald Trump’s most prominent allies. She helped lead the Republic’s coverage of the “Stop the Steal” movement in Arizona and was part of the team that wrote the series “Democracy in Doubt,” which won the 2021 Scripps Howard Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment.
“Time after time, Jen has delivered powerful stories that reveal the fragility of our election system and expose efforts to undermine it,” said Robin Fields, senior editor. “She could not be joining ProPublica at a more crucial moment in covering these issues.”
“I am thrilled to join ProPublica and to get to work alongside its incredible journalists,” Fifield said. “This is a pivotal moment for elections in the U.S., and it’s time to really dig in. I can’t wait to start.”
