"I don't think that this is a typical president-elect," explained Huseman, who authored ProPublica's series of tweets aimed at debunking Trump's claims. "If he's going to choose to make Twitter his main means of communication, then that means we need to change the way that we respond."

The decision to rebut Trump on Twitter — or to rebut him at all — was not an obvious one for ProPublica, which had repeatedly shot down voter fraud conspiracy theories before Election Day on its Electionland blog. In an email conversation on Sunday, Huseman said she and her colleagues debated "whether this was a distraction or whether we should take it on."

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"There were a couple of people who thought it was a distraction, and we shouldn't really address it," Huseman said. "But I was of the mind that if the president-elect of the United States takes on the democracy that just elected him, that's not something we should just ignore. ... He actually made a pretty serious allegation, and we should deal with it."

ProPublica could have dealt with it in a traditional story format, but Huseman said "it wasn't clear to us, given the vagueness of his claims, that we needed to scramble around, assemble a bunch of people and produce a detailed article on a Sunday night in order to debunk a claim that we've debunked through Electionland a dozen other times. We could just use things that we've previously written to call it what it was and pretty substantively call it a lie on the medium he chose to use to make the claim. So that's what we decided to do."

This was the result:

But we saw no reason to doubt the results. There

ProPublica was able to answer Trump quickly because it had gathered extensive, on-the-ground accounts of Election Day procedures for a special project it had been planning since March.

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"On Election Day, we previously didn't do any coverage at all," Huseman said. "We would do investigations of the candidates leading up to Election Day, and once a president was elected we would do investigations of their background afterwards, but on Election Day we just kind of went home and watched the results like everybody else. [Deputy managing editor] Scott [Klein] wanted to do something that would bring ProPublica's unique position in the journalism world to bear on Election Day."

That "something" was a massive vote monitoring effort that revealed some small-scale problems but reinforced the overall integrity of the result. "In the days leading up to the election," Huseman said, "we thought if [Trump] loses and he makes claims that he lost because of voter fraud, we can say, 'Well, you didn't, and we know because we are an authoritative voice here.' "

Then Trump won.

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"The day after the election," Huseman said, "the president of ProPublica was like, 'If he had lost, you guys would have been in a great position to do this.' It never even occurred to us that he would continue these ridiculous accusations even after he won."

But he did, and ProPublica was ready to knock them down on social media.