Nieman Foundation at Harvard
“Is wearing Taylor Swift merch or a trash bag considering electioneering in Kansas? What if you dress your kid up as Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?”
“A used car dealership owner in Texas told his employees he’d reimburse anyone who votes $20 worth of food at one of several local restaurants. Is that illegal?”
“Should we expect clashes between federal and state election monitors at polling locations?”
“When are these three small counties in Maryland supposed to count mail-in ballots?”
These are just some of the questions being asked — and answered — in a Slack for journalists spun up by the nonprofit newsroom Votebeat and funded by the Knight Foundation. The nearly 100 election experts on hand to answer voting-related questions include election administrators, nonprofit leaders, cybersecurity experts, public historians, attorneys specializing in election law, nonpartisan voter access advocates, misinformation researchers, public policy professors, and more. More than 375 journalists had joined as of Monday and the help desk will stay open, at least, through the “Safe Harbor” deadline by which states must have certified their votes in early December.
Votebeat editorial director Jessica Huseman ran a similar collaborative project called Electionland for ProPublica in 2016, 2018, and 2020. Four years ago, she noted, journalists were not asking questions about certification or worrying how readers might respond to delays in reporting results. Both journalists and election officials are “significantly more prepared” for this election, Huseman said. The intervening four years, after all, brought us violence and rioting over certifying an election, denialists organizing to dispute future results, and a president attempting to overturn an election and repeatedly spreading false information about voters and results.
“I think that lesson has been fully learned between 2020 and today. You’d be hard pressed to go to a news organization that is responsibly covering the election — which I think is most of them — and not find a story [saying], ‘Hey, we might not know the results on Election Day,'” Huseman said. “In 2020, people would ask ‘Why are they still counting ballots? That’s weird.’ It’s a different news environment now.”
Huseman said Electionland pushed out tips and potential story ideas to newsrooms in earlier cycles, but this time around she’s skipping that to focus on connecting reporters to high-quality sources.
“Finding, verifying, and pushing out tips is a huge amount of work,” she said. Maybe more importantly? “Journalists are better at picking these stories, anyway — the stories we suggest to them, they’re already doing. The more impactful thing for these journalists is to just give them the right contact information, because it is my deeply held belief that journalists write the correct story when they talk to the correct sources.”
“The problem with voting stories is that the people who make themselves most available don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” she added. “They’re campaign operatives, or they’re people with a really good PR sending emails every three minutes. The last email in these reporters’ inbox is from some fly-by-night cyber tech firm that wants to talk to them about cyber security but the journalists are calling with really specific questions about, like, the use of e-poll books in Chester County. Reducing the friction between people who can answer those questions at that level of specificity and the reporters who have those questions is, I think, the best way to improve coverage.”
When I reached Huseman on the eve of the election, she was refueling with a protein shake mixed with an espresso shot. She’d stocked up on food and new toys to distract her dog, a handsome little guy named after Walter Cronkite, during her upcoming TV appearances. She expected questions from reporters to peak Tuesday morning and then again as polls close. (“We’re going to see a lot of questions about how long is too long of a line?” she noted. “The answer is half an hour, by the way.”)
Huseman expects covering the voting process to look more like a marathon than a sprint.
“We don’t expect that the voting is going to conclude and people’s questions about voting are going to stop, because these candidates — and especially the Trump campaign — are going to be making claims about what did or did not go wrong,” Huseman said. Though “many of those are likely to be incorrect,” she added, “they will influence the confidence that people have in the overall results.”
Reporters interested in joining the Slack with election experts can still sign up here. (You’ll be asked to link to verify your identity, share contact information for your editor, and link to previous reporting or your news organization’s ethics policy.)
