Every two years, ProPublica asks itself a question: What should a newsroom dedicated to methodical, long-term investigations do with itself on Election Day when readers are hungry for fast-moving breaking news?
Our answer, since 2016, has been to use our data, investigative and collaboration expertise to cover voting itself. While other newsrooms mount large-scale operations to answer the question “Who won?” our question is, rather, “Who can’t vote, and why?”
Our Electionland project, which I help lead, looks at long lines, broken voting machines, harassment at the polls, misinformation about voting, ballot design problems and legal maneuvers that make voting hard or impossible for eligible voters. These issues have always been important, but they may be decisive in 2020 with a sitting president who has spent months undermining confidence in the integrity of America’s voting system. Not since the 2000 presidential election, which put George W. Bush in the White House despite him losing the popular vote, have the intricacies of our state-by-state, county-by-county election system mattered more.
The project has already published more than three dozen stories about this year’s election, and on Nov. 3, we expect to publish many more. We also provide the data and tips we collect to more than 150 newsrooms around the country, free of charge, so they can do their own reporting and publish stories about voting problems in their area.
We share this information because our mission calls on us to do journalism that creates real-world change — and what better way to effect change than to help power great, data-backed reporting in local newsrooms around the country?
Voting is the one of the defining features of a democracy, and Electionland covers voting problems as urgent issues to be addressed while polls are still open.
Electionland relies on your participation. If you run into problems voting or witness anything suspicious at your polling place, visit election.land to more tell us more about your experience. You can also text VOTE to 81380 (text VOTA for Spanish and 投票 for Chinese).
(And if you’re a journalist, that link has information about how you can participate as a reporter.)
While Nov. 3 is shaping up to be unprecedented and potentially chaotic, Electionland is built for exactly that.
In ProPublica’s earliest days, Paul Steiger, our founding editor, used to say that while a daily newspaper represented “an entire supermarket” of coverage, from sports to metro to culture to politics, ProPublica would be “just one aisle.” That is, the one dedicated to long-form investigative reporting about the full range of abuses of power and betrayal of the public trust.
For many years we mostly considered covering Election Day to be in somebody else’s aisle. While tracking results is an important public service and an entirely appropriate — often heroic — responsibility for a newsroom, we never saw it as something that made sense for ProPublica.
An opportunity to change that came early in 2016, when a few of us first read a study done in 2013 called “Waiting in Line to Vote.” That study concluded that during the 2012 election, people waited in lines that were so long that many of them just abandoned the effort. More than half a million voters, according to researchers, ended up being effectively disenfranchised by long lines.
What’s worse, the long lines were not randomly or evenly distributed. Communities of color experienced far longer lines, on average, than did white communities.
We joined forces with a few other organizations, including Google News Lab, WNYC, First Draft and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, to create a large-scale journalistic operation to use what data we could find to detect long lines and other problems and to share that information with local newsrooms. We operated a physical newsroom at CUNY in midtown Manhattan, working with journalism students working across the country. More than 1,000 of us pored over social media and call center reports of voting problems, publishing dozens of stories and achieving real impact.
We ran Electionland during the 2018 midterms, and thanks to a grant from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, we’re running Electionland again this year.
The project has already started: Over the last month, more than a dozen journalists have been poring over data from early and mail-in voting. We’ve sent out hundreds of tips to our partner newsrooms, and for the first time this year are publishing in both English and Spanish.
Because of the pandemic, this year the newsroom will be virtual, but we’ve got hundreds of reporters from ProPublica and partner newsrooms across the country ready to start work when polls open on Nov. 3.
We’ll miss the energy and camaraderie of being in the same room with other journalists covering the same story, not to mention the free pizza, but our goal remains the same: to help spur real-world impact from our journalism.