 So, just in recent years, many states, too many states have passed laws to make it harder to vote, such as voter ID laws, and too many efforts are undermining people's ability to vote, such as voter roll purges and cuts to early voting. The ACLU points out communities that are particularly susceptible to suppression, and in some cases outright targeted people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Today we're talking with Susan Richardson, the Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Public Integrity, and Rachel Glickhouse, the Partnership Manager of ProPublica's Election Land Project. Both the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica have ambitious efforts underway. But first, let me tell you a little bit about these outstanding women. Susan Smith Richardson is a veteran journalist who previously served as the editorial director of Newsroom Practice Change at the Solutions Journalism Network. Prior to that, Susan was editor and publisher at the Chicago Reporter, a nonprofit investigative newsroom that focuses on race, poverty, and income inequality. And Susan was also managing editor at the Texas Observer, a most venerable voice for independent journalism in the state of Texas. And Susan brings experience as an editor at the Chicago Tribune and the Sacramento Bee, where she led a team that reported on grassroots efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 unrest. And joining us also, Rachel Glickhouse is a journalist and partner manager for the Election Land Project. Previously she was partner manager for ProPublica's Documenting Hate for three years. And Rachel is going to tell us a little bit about that project as well if you're not familiar with it. And prior to joining ProPublica, Rachel worked at Univision Medium and the American Society Council of the Americas. She has also written for Al Jazeera America Quartz and the Global Post. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Rachel, for joining me today. So what I'd like to do to get started is if you could just please share with us a little bit about the projects that are underway. So Susan, let's begin with barriers to the ballot box, a series of stories, and the database that the Center for Public Integrity has made available to the public and to other journalists. Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks for inviting me, and I'm really excited to be here with Rachel. So much of the project barriers to the ballot boxes is really the hard work that's been put in for a good year now with the reporting staff beginning with Carrie Levine and Pratik Ravala. But in short, this is what the project is, and let me tell you about the two pieces. Barriers to the ballot boxes is essentially looking at this. What has been the effect of polling place changes on the ability to vote since the landmark Supreme Court Shelby decision in 2013? That was a decision that effectively diluted some aspects of the Voting Rights Act, which we know was passed so famously by a lot of the sweat and labor folks like John Lewis, to allow access to the ballot box, especially targeting in its origins African Americans. But it has come to just serve all sorts of communities across the country today. So our idea was simply this. What has happened with changes to these polling place locations, and how has that affected the ability to vote? That was the beginning of the project, but of course COVID as we're talking about now was the big change changer. So the idea of just looking at polling place closures really got amplified. To look at additional polling place closures as a result of not having enough poll workers and all the other things that COVID has created. But also we expanded the lens to look at the effect of mail-in voting, because now that has become such an important issue in the context of addressing the pandemic. So the project kind of expanded in scope. But let me go back to its essence, and it's really two pieces. It is reporting and reporting on local level or state level barriers to voting under our 50 states of disenfranchisement, where we talk about problems with access to the ballot. But then the bigger part of it, and that we think is really an important public service, is the work that the reporters put in on creating a unique dataset that looks at federal elections and polling place closures in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018, and what we can say about what has changed in those locations going all the way back to 2012. So as we think about it, moving into the 2020 election, we're actually going to have some data we can measure things against, because we've gone back and we've looked at these polling place closures going back to 2012. So instead of just saying, you know, we're going to use this information for ourselves, we released the data that we gathered on 30 states thus far, more to come through GitHub to make it available to anyone who wants to do a journalist or researcher who really wants to look at the impact of these polling place closures long term and coming up on who had the ability to vote and how and why. Thank you, Susan. And I just put a link in the chat to the series and we'll also add a link on how you and other journalists in the public can access the database that Susan referenced. Rachel, tell us how the Elections Land project operates. Sure. So Election Land is a very large scale collaborative project that ProPublica originally launched in 2016 and we also ran it in 2018. So this is our third time running this project and the idea is to work with other newsrooms to cover voting problems in real time, to be able to identify problems as they're happening and to be able to report on them in a way that is collaborative and really reaches a national scale. So essentially we recruit partner newsrooms. They are mostly local newsrooms, but we also have some national ones as well so that we can identify where problems are happening and send out tips to partners that they can follow up on. So we do this through crowdsourcing, so we are asking the public to help us by telling us when they are encountering problems with voting or witnessing them. We also get access to a data set through a hotline that's run independently, but we can see where calls are coming from and a summary of what people are complaining about. So we basically have two data sets that we give out to our partners so that they can see where problems are happening and give them information they can use to follow up on, to potentially report stories. So the project has evolved a little bit since 2016. That year we had a very large operation that involved all of the types of newsrooms I mentioned, but also J-Schools and J-School students and professors. And we relied really heavily on mining social media to try to identify problems, to see what people were complaining about publicly on social media. We really refined that approach in 2018 to focus on the two data sets I mentioned before. The idea is we may find some things on social, but generally speaking, we're going to have more success basically going directly to voters to find out what's happening. And we can use social as a supplement to identify additional information or additional evidence about those problems that are happening. We also work very closely with First Draft, which is an organization that focuses on misinformation. And they spend a lot of time mining social to identify what types of misinformation are popping up, what is being circulated, what has reached sort of a level at which it is sort of a tipping point for how far that misinformation has spread. For the purposes of our project, we are mostly just interested in misinformation about the voting process. There's obviously a lot of misinformation about a lot of things at the moment. But for the purposes of our project, we want to know when and if misinformation is spreading about how to vote, where to vote, that sort of thing. So this year, we are very much following this approach of focusing on these two, these data sets. We also are very concerned with cybersecurity. So that's something we will also be looking at, particularly on election day. And using a couple other sort of data sets and things we can get access to, to supplement any information we can find about where voting problems are happening and what types of problems are happening. Rachel, before I turn back to Susan, before I turn back to Susan, can you tell us just two or three areas where you're reporting, where the social media mining is identifying problems with voter suppression? Are you finding early voting sites, for example, not being available, mail-in ballots, particular states, just making it difficult for mail-in voting, ballots? Sure. I'll give you an example from 2018. One thing that we identified through tips and through, and this isn't about misinformation, but through tips and through social media, it was that in New York, there were a lot of people complaining that there were huge lines piling up, voting sites around the city on election day, that there were lots of machines breaking down and therefore causing the lines to build up and causing people to give up on waiting in those lines. And so we did some digging and discovered that the problem was actually pretty straightforward, which is that it was a rainy day in New York and the ballots were damp because the humidity was so high and people had wet coats and relas and things, and the damp ballots were jamming up the scanners. And this was happening around the city. So we did a story on that that we did collaboratively with folks at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and our team. One thing I would just like to emphasize is that not all voting problems are malicious intentional voter suppression. I want to really drive the fact home that there are a good subset of problems that involve voting that involve either some level of incompetence, lack of planning, lack of funding, and that isn't to say that these things aren't some greater evidence of voter suppression because of a lack of interest in providing funding and that sort of thing, but I think that's really important for journalists to understand and particularly for how they frame stories because very often some of the problems we find are incompetence-based problems. So problems with the voting machines, just problems with chads, that sort of thing. Yes. Yeah, I mean, for example, machines are a good example because sometimes poll workers don't have enough training and they literally don't know how to properly operate them. Great. Got it. Got it. Thank you. So Susan, so barriers to the ballot box is a series that's series that's been running for more than a year and Craig Newmark who has been such a generous funder for many journalism initiatives and is a primary funder for this project. Tell us what your reporters have uncovered and how that relates to the Voting Rights Act. If I can, I want to go back to two things really quickly that I failed to mention. First, we're doing this project in partnership with Stateline, which is a wonderful partner in their initiative of the Pew Charitable Trust. But if I could also say something about what Rachel said, I think, you know, her part about framing is really, really important. And there are kind of two things. There is a question of, yes, things are happening that are not, perhaps are not intentional in terms of voter suppression. I think the context issue, though, here is this. There's intent and then there's just the impact. So the impact on, whether it's on, in some of the reporting we've done, tribal nations, you know, Native American communities, African American communities, there can be a separation between intent and who is most directly affected. So the policy, sometimes there is a policy issue, clearly other times there are, as she's pointing out, just simply errors and process problems. I think we don't want to lose sight of, though, the impact and which voters are most affected. So just to separate intent from impact is something that we have to continue to think about in framing these issues. And the other part is just the history. You know, there is a long history, which is why we have a voting rights act of a contested democracy. And when you just read the history of the vote in the country, whether it was because you were, you know, an indentured servant or whatever it is, there's a long history of framing who has the right and privilege. And we don't want to lose that history either while we should be very mindful and data driven about distinction between who's affected and intent. So I want to embrace what she's saying. We're also saying we do have a history in the country that we should also be mindful of, but certainly be led by the data. And I think that that's, that's really an important point. You know, kind of getting straight on to your question. One of the questions that drove the project at the beginning and the research started a year ago. So I was literally walking into the door when our great reporters were already thinking about this polling place project and looking at it in the context of Shelby. The point was not to say there will be a predetermined outcome, but the point of doing the homework was to really look so we could see how health people been affected since this important change to the Voting Rights Act. And I think that's an important frame because one must look for what the impact of all of this has been on, on who gets to vote, especially in a climate where all these other issues are happening that, that are policy driven. So the project though really did want to be able to say definitively through data what's happening. Is this happening here? Is it not happening here? And that's kind of the genesis of the project. Now just to kind of move forward on some really important stories that I think we've been able to tell so far. I was, you know, thinking about one of the early pieces was looking at what was happening in Johnson County, Iowa, which is the county seat for Iowa City. And of course, you know, Iowa is so fundamental to the election process because of the caucuses. But we sent two reporters there who really looked and their whole frame was whether Iowa and the challenges there would be a dress rehearsal for other people running elections across the country. Because by then we knew we were smack dab in the middle of a pandemic. We already knew existing challenges to being able to, to vote and a number of issues. So that Iowa piece, I feel really attempted, even though Iowa was not, you know, was never covered by Shelby, it did attempt to kind of set the ground on the challenges. And some of these things become intentional. So here's a, here's a county in which the election official had to address two lawsuits over how the mail-in ballots were being sent. The fundamental challenge in an overwhelmingly democratic county by the Trump administration was this, that you can't put the voter ID numbers there. Instead, you need to send blank mail-in ballots to people rather than put the voter ID numbers on there. And of course, the, the point of that for the election administrator was to make voting as easy as possible for people. But then you look at the implications of the lawsuit and you have to question what was the point of that to say, don't put the voter IDs. So you're going to have a more challenging time for people to be able to return them and make sure that those ballots get counted. So we are seeing, in a skirmish, just playing out between those election officials whose primary concern in some cases is simply to make sure that voting is as easy as possible, whether it's in person or it's the mail-in ballots. And you're seeing legal challenges by the administration or by the Trump campaign, excuse me, that are really about making it more challenging for ballots in certain places to be counted. That part, you know, one must argue is, is there's, there's intent there. But by getting on the ground, we hope to be able to just show the very complex and varied ways in which the ability to vote for whatever reason is, is challenged. So I was, was kind of a dress rehearsal and setting the stage for, here's what's happening in this overwhelmingly democratic county. But we've also, of course, looked at, at other places at other states, like we talked about Arizona, where there are other challenges and opportunities playing out, many of them that are playing out in a, in a really, really partisan way. Susan, and of course, the, with the global pandemic, mail-in ballots is an option that many, many people are looking to use this, this election season. And Rachel, just as an example of the power of collaboration, I read the story that election, that the election land project ProPublica did with WRAL TV in, in North Carolina about the concerns over, over mail-in ballots. Tell us how that story came, came about and what did it report? Sure. So we have a data reporter in-house named Sophie Chao, who is dedicated to elections this year. And she had been digging in to the 2018 data for North Carolina's midterm elections and had noticed through some analysis that there seemed to be disparities in whose mail-in ballots were getting rejected. So we reached out to WRAL, which is a partner we have worked with before, both on big collaborations and one-on-one collaborations. They also have a great data reporter there, Tyler Dukes, who could also, you know, really help with the reporting, the sort of data-heavy reporting we were doing on their end. He actually is at the News and Observer now. But they worked on that story together for a couple months, hammering out some of the very specific caveats and trying, it took a long time to get to the point where they could make definitive assertions about certain things because, for example, sometimes people just don't return their mail-in ballot. There are a variety of things in that data that can be really confusing, which is why we had people who are real data experts work on this story. And then we co-published together as we sometimes do, as we often do at ProPublica and sometimes do on election land to really hone in on what was happening, what we could identify was already happening in the state at a time when mail-in voting is really exploding. And we also published that story a little around the time that some of the new data was coming out about what ballots are getting rejected in 2020. And there was certainly an alignment there between what had already been happening and what was happening now during the presidential election. Yeah, and what's not clear to me yet is we're now seeing a lot of television advertisements on down in Pennsylvania, so we're seeing a lot of political advertisements and lots of advertisements about voting. And in Pennsylvania, requesting voters to sign, for example, very specifically and date the outside of the envelope. But what happens when someone does it incorrectly? They don't sign the outside of the envelope. They don't date it. Is that ballot automatically rejected? Do they get it? Is it returned? And are they then told to resubmit properly with instructions? So one of the really frustrating things about covering voting and one of the other reasons why we do this project as a national level collaboration is that every state has its own laws around voting, its own regulations, and elections are run in very different ways in each state. Sometimes they're run on the municipal level, sometimes on the county level. So we have essentially 10,000 elections that happen on election day instead of one, whereas in other countries, for example, they they are run in a much more central fashion. So to answer, I can't really answer your question because it is different everywhere. Also, this particular aspect of what they call curing ballots, it's called the vote cure process, is under litigation in some places or has been under litigation. There's a record amount of voting litigation in general this year and much of it has to do with mail voting. And this is a really key component that has been the subject of lawsuits about what that process looks like, how long the voters have to get back to the authorities with the changes. They're also in some states third party trackers so that you can see what's going on with your ballot so that in theory you should be able to see the status of what's happening throughout the process. So there are a number of things in place that have changed a great deal because mail balloting has become mail voting has now become a huge much much bigger thing in places that typically didn't really use it that much before. So in some places there are trackers that people can use and some states have this cure process in place where voters are supposed to be given the opportunity to fix certain problems. How that actually happens in real life is another story and one we are certainly going to see play out this fall. Well another great reason for journalists to be on it and there's ways to join the election land project for your local newsroom, local journalists, national journalists. We have the link in the chat. There's a couple of other projects I just want to mention we'll also put those links into the chat. One is the trust election network which is a network that is being operated by the American Press Institute and a new effort called Vote Beat that began with founders of of Chalk Beat with the real focus on local. So we'll put links to that in the chat. And before we get to questions from the from the audience please put your questions in the chat we'd love to hear from you. I'd love to Susan and Rachel to you bring just such great expertise and experience how can and and how should journalists be be planning be planning their reporting around the voting voting the voting process between now and election day and after election day and also the President of the United States has called on poll watchers. I'm not quite sure what that means and I just want to make sure that we get to that question and how journalists should be thinking about that and Rachel as the former partnership manager of the documentary hate project would love your insights on that but Susan first tell us how should journalists be be preparing what could they be doing now. Yeah that's a great question if I can I want to piggy back on something that Rachel said that I want to get right to that question. I really think it can't be understated what she said how challenging it is to just collect this data about what's happening across the country with the elections because you have so many jurisdictions. It took you know 1200 public records request to get the data that we did for bearers to the ballot box and I'll just think about my home state of Texas which has 254 counties and basically you're trying to get information from 254 elections administrators so that's just just a pure scale will make your eyes willing to back your head. The other point too that she made about the the challenge of the balloting process so different states have different rules around mail and balloting. Some people were already there with no excuses others weren't so it really is like you know trying to tease the crab out of the gumbo if you're from Louisiana you know what I mean it's just impossible um so or the okra so so it is very different from place to place. I think the the interesting thing I want to point out on that though is the Arizona case which is all about you know the mail-in ballot and and this is the big part that's going to go to the Supreme Court or one of two parts and that is if I uh if I do my mail-in ballot can anyone return it for me at the polling place and or at a you know at an election office and basically the status said no and that's being kicked up to the Supreme Court so to her point there are a lot of lawsuits that are playing out right now some will not be settled until after uh the November election week month year whatever it turns into and and these are really critical contests around the quality of of our democracy and electoral and democratic processes so I uh I just wanted to jump on that and say that's that's so critical and it makes the work really challenging. You know as far as election night we're not in the position where you know we are the folks who are worried about you know where we don't do the horse race that is not our DNA and therefore what you can say or can't say is not of an immediate concern but it is in a larger sense of responsibility and journalistic integrity and that is that the our argument would be that what we want to be able to provide through the entire election process and especially moving from the election night forward is just context and understanding of of whatever process may play out some of that is just understanding the you know having historical framework uh it may be looking back on what happened in the last election but it could also be uh as someone pointed out in a recent news guys conversation looking at the whole importance of what legislative process is kicked in if you end up with um a no clear 270 winner through the electoral college what we would like to do is to be able to bring to people who have cast their ballots a context about how the process works and an understanding of what the options may be more so than saying you know caring about the outcome because the outcome is really a moving piece so that's one thing the other thing we hope to do with the they're releasing this data to get cub and some potential partnerships is to be able to look at in real time what the effect uh or where are the polling places where you're seeing you know the most challenges are people out there with the longest lines those are things that we think add value so historical context but also being able to look at how the process is playing out uh to the extent one can in real time on election day at polling place locations thank you sissy that's very helpful and what's also so helpful is the historical context that you've provided throughout this this conversation thank you rachel as the former partnership manager of documenting hate your have documented hate around around this country that was a project that began several years ago what concerns do you have about the calls for poll watchers for for example we've just had this extraordinary extraordinary incident in michigan with an investigation uncovering a plot against a group of men to kidnap uh the governor of michigan so what uh based on your experience what did journalists be looking out for and how should they be planning um their poll watching yeah so one one thing i would say is that in 2016 we were also concerned about this issue because trump made similar calls in 2016 and made efforts to sign people up for his um this this process and what ended up happening mostly in practice in 2016 is that that list was used really as a listserv for um you know uh get out the vote efforts um and we didn't see widespread uh uh you know voter intimidation happening at the polls with groups of people driving to the polls and um harassing voters um so it was something we were very worried about and definitely thinking about in 2016 um the difference this year uh is that um a consent decree um uh that the r&c was subject to around um uh it's called ballot security uh expired in 2018 um so that means that there's a bit of a difference now between now and 2016 after this consent decree expired um and we've also seen just a lot of uh rhetoric and uh talk about this particular issue in addition to um the presence of these groups of some of these uh extremist groups popping up um one thing i would say is that um there there are two things i i think are important to keep in mind one one thing is that um part of what some of these groups do is attempt to harness the power of the media to recruit people to their cause uh i happen to have more experience um with some of the more say traditional white supremacist groups because that's more what we covered during documenting hate uh some of these other groups that have been coming up are certainly have overlap but um there's there's ideological differences for example um um but what i would say is that one thing that we talked a lot about during documenting hate is and one thing we always weighed um was making sure that we weren't helping them do propaganda for them uh because that is a big part of what they tried to do um is to use uh media to use their platforms to harness social media and other ways to recruit more people to their cause so that's one thing i would just say um to keep in mind uh to be thoughtful about the other thing i would say is that um we we definitely are seeing um um uh things that people are concerned about we know that there there's been a lot of reporting on this particular issue about people being concerned about folks showing up at polling places one thing i would say is another thing we have to be very careful about is we certainly want to be prepared for the worst and we certainly want to be prepared to cover that uh and to be able to do that um safely and thoughtfully um but i would also say the one thing we don't want to do is disenfranchise voters by scaring them away from going to the polls this year obviously a big difference between this year and last and the last presidential election is that people have more options um because of this massive expansion of vote by mail so in a large number of states vote by mail is definitely an option but you know time is running out for that to be an option in many places you know you really have to there you have to request your ballot you have to get it back there are a lot of different rules around uh drop boxes and other things depending on what state you're in so um you know if folks are not voting by mail and they've made a plan to vote in person um we want to make sure that we don't disenfranchise those people by frightening them that that's not going to be possible to do safely so i think we need to focus part of what we're doing as our project is to be able to identify if these incidents are happening where they're happening and what the response is um what we don't want to do is um uh sort of generalize and hypothesize about what might happen in a way that people are going to get scared about so i hope that's i mean i don't i don't want to sound too wishy washy but i think those two issues are just really important to keep in mind thank you rachel and susan i see you nodding your um head and again long before the center for public integrity you've been a leading journalist in texas at the in chicago um do you have anything that you want to add to that about how um the balance between um reporting on concerns about uh these poll waters and and what that might be and not scaring away people at the polls no just that i agree 100 with what rachel said i mean that's that's just plain responsible i i think our our larger goal you know has to be and this is not an agenda goal for journalists to say that part of what we do is to ensure the systems of democracy are working that is that is with that framework with that mindset that we should be covering the election process we are anyway and i think we need to lock that down on election day um i do think it's important not to feed into misinformation or fear or chaos uh about whether or not one should go and and i do think in saying talking about issues in real time it's less about talking about uh you know our white militia showing up at this place it's more looking at where there are challenges in terms of long lines which i think has a level of value but once again to rachel's point you don't want to say that to discourage people from showing up you want to say it and figure out how do you frame it in a way that that has meaning so i think by highlighting that you don't have to say don't go but you have to be mindful this messaging around that saying um we're trying to know and understand how things are playing out and how access is playing out as opposed to you should be frustrated and not go so i mean i i think adding the context to the reporting on the day of is is where the difference gets made and i just want to add that in the chat Stephanie Murray who runs the center for cooperative media at mont clade mont claire state university has added a link um called to election sos which she says has a great scenario planning guide um so please go to the chat and get that link uh we have a couple of questions one question uh rachel is is is for you on what data set should a journalist outside of outside of social should um should journalists be looking at on election day um so i would just like to recommend the center for public integrity's data um you know polling place data is super important and it has changed so much because of the pandemic because um so many places have refused to act as polling places uh there've been there's been a big shift to large-scale um polling places like stadiums uh so this is going to be really important also uh you know sorry to keep using it new york as an example but i live here so um early voting sites new york city uh are different in some cases than day of voting sites which is potentially going to confuse people um and so figuring that out having having a list of the polling sites is i think really key um if you have someone who um has a little bit of data experience on your staff uh getting your state voter file can unlock all sorts of uh interesting things um so that's another one i would say is a hugely helpful data set uh a lot of major newsrooms buy these um they sort of range in price and accessibility so it really depends on your state uh there there's some there's at least one state that charges a lot of money but in other cases it's not so much um we'll also be looking at google trends which we have traditionally done on election day um as part of election land so that's something we'll also be looking at to see what if anything we can find um in um trend data about what people are searching for so those are a couple of different things um that i can think of initially and then the other thing is you know we're we're running out of time a little bit but um the the data from past elections is in something called the eaves data which is compiled by the eac um so that is accessible through their site and you can download it um again it would be helpful if you have someone with a little more data experience to be able to to sort of go through that but that is publicly available data and susan how might um folks get access to the incredible data set on polling locations and polling location changes that cpi has been filming well uh thanks rachel and we released this data to github so people can access it there okay great well thank you everyone for joining us for this episode of informed and engaged and we know that um how valuable and how important reporting is um in addition to voter um suppression there's just as rachel said sometimes let's it's just plain old in competence and uh we just uh are really dependent really really really dependent on great reporting and great collaborative reporting thank you everyone thank you susan thank you rachel