Jessica Huseman, Senior reporting fellow at ProPublica: We\u2019re at CUNY Newsroom which pro-public has set up for Electionland\u2026 TEXT CARD More than 250 news organizations and 14 journalism schools joined efforts to monitor the first election without full protection of the Voting Rights Act. Jessica Huseman This center is set up to track things that prevent people from voting or prevent people from voting in a timely way. That is typically issues with election administration broken voting machines long lines because there are not enough polling places poll workers giving wrong instructions to voters 1.52 we have people who are who are feeding us information we have graduate students from Columbia and CUNY school of journalism here. And we also have what are called catchers which take the information from students and make sure that it’s authentic and well-packaged so that that can go to reporters Darius Johnson, Columbia Journalism Schoo It feels like I am a detective and it also feels like I’m just like this hard news journalist again I’m working in the NEWSROOM call and verifying trying to get things as if I’m working on a story. — TRUMP BITE ON rigged elections here: there is no evidence to suggest that voter fraud is a widespread problem at all. There was a 2014 study that was posted by the Washington Post that took ballots from 2000 and 2004 and seen more than a billion ballots cast and within those billion ballots only found 31 credible instances of in-person voter fraud which is the type of fraud that Donald Trump has been talking about when he tells us that if the election is rigged \u2026.. NATPOP - TRUMP - \u201cYou have to get everybody to get out there and watch DARIUS There was a woman in Pennsylvania who said that there was voter intimidation going on at one of the polling places where citizens were individualise once they came in by political party. So if you are a Democrat you were voting at the booth with the blue curtain if you were a Republican you are voting at a booth with a red curtain. So that was something that was very interesting to me and I reached out she did tell me what happened but I found it hard to be able to verify. The actual location of where it was taking place Caitlin Healy, Columbia Journalism School I caught about five minutes ago a county clerk in Michigan announced that voters had to have their photo I.D. when in reality they didn’t they could vote they could sign an affidavit saying that they didn’t have photo ID and then still be allowed to vote Jessica statistically you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than coming across in case of in-person voter fraud. 4.00 So our students have key words programmed into TweetDeck to look for things on Twitter. We’re also looking for things on Facebook signal and Instagram Darius Johnson, Columbia Journalism School [00:31:38] Key words strike attention voter intimidation long lines down the block home to hours on what else. Rigged. I’ve done Philly I’ve done Imay politics. Caitlin Healy, Columbia Journalism School 22.30 is it’s pretty finely tuned machine right now in this newsroom and it feels like the way campaigns are going to be the early elections are going to be covered in the future. [00:08:13] 10.00 So we have noticed that in previous elections the focus has been more on the horse race It’s not been really about whether or not people could cast a ballot who tried to cast a ballot. And so the coverage we’ve seen has been the next day and that’s after anybody could do anything about it. So we’re hoping that if we can put cameras we can put reporters out in front of long lines out in front of polling places with broken machines out in front of polling places where admit we’re polling workers are not following the law then we can fix those problems really quickly and do something about it today instead of learning lessons from it for next time.