Many news organizations will make election integrity issues a central part of their coverage plans, especially given accusations by the U.S. government of Russian cyber espionage and Donald Trump’s evidence-less allegations of vote tampering and rigging. | AP Photo Media launches joint war-room to spot voting problems To covering 2016’s voting obstacles and hoaxes, press tries sharing tips, sources and data across typically competing newsrooms.

After spending 2016 trying to outmaneuver each other and deliver the next big break, hundreds of newsrooms are now engaged in unprecedented reporting partnerships to uncover barriers to voting and debunk fake news that can cause chaos and confusion on Election Day.

The biggest of the new alliances is Electionland, a project involving more than 400 newsrooms across the country casting aside competitiveness to share real-time data and tips on everything from reports about long lines and voter intimidation to hoax tweets suggesting stuffed ballot boxes.


New York-based journalism non-profit ProPublica created the free service earlier this year by partnering up with national desks at USA Today and The New York Times, as well as scores of local news organizations including the Arizona Republic, Miami Herald and the Virginian-Pilot. Participating reporters and editors are all connected to an online smorgasbord of story leads and sources culled from social media, text messages and a national telephone helpline that the public is using to report voting problems.

“It’s an entire national newsroom, essentially only looking at problems facing people who vote,” said Jessica Huseman, a ProPublica senior reporting fellow.

While the Associated Press and CNN were among the major media outlets that declined invitations to join Electionland, it was a no-brainer for many local outlets crushed in recent years by layoffs and budget cuts. After all, what they’re getting is no-strings-attached data, technology and information that can go a long way to covering one of most challenging days of a journalist’s year.

“Any help a newsroom can get to sift through some of this stuff, to get to the more useful stuff, is absolutely valuable,” said Matt Dempsey, a Houston Chronicle data reporter leading his office’s coordination with Electionland.

Last week, Dempsey’s team published a front-page story based off multiple Electionland tips that led them to find poll workers in Harris County, Texas, giving voters incomplete instructions about photo identification. Other recent stories tied to Electionland’s analysis during the early voting period include Donald Trump supporters using a bullhorn outside the polls in West Palm Beach, Fla., and debunking a pair of internet hoaxes: one purporting to show video of Democrats stuffing ballot boxes and the other co-published with Univision that appears to show an immigration officer arresting someone waiting in line to vote.

Much of the dot-connecting is emanating from Electionland’s national desk based out of a pop-up newsroom at the City University of New York. There are also regional teams stationed at 14 journalism schools around the country, where students will be mining social media through keyword searches in multiple languages, looking out for local, regional and national trends about long lines, provisional ballot shortages, overly aggressive poll watchers and other forms of voter intimidation. Students have been trained to identify legitimate Twitter accounts, and they’re getting on-site help from professional reporters dispatched by ProPublica, the USA Today and The New York Times to package up relevant information for sharing – jump-ball style – to their media partners for follow-up reporting.

Electionland is also tapping into data generated by the national 866-OUR-VOTE telephone hotline that’s been taking calls on everything from malfunctioning election equipment to voter ID and intimidation problems. “They’re seeing the meat and potatoes of complaints,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has been running its phone-reporting program since 2002.

USA Today’s editors said in an interview that they expect Electionland will be a useful tool for their network of regional reporters at 25 sister newspapers across the country. They anticipate some of the leads will be false starts, and in some instances they’ll need to skip a tip because of staffing constraints, picking up on it later if it pans out through aggregation from other news sources.

But they said the project had plenty of relevance in a high-stakes election ripe with voting challenges, and where memories remain strong of the 2000 debacle when Florida’s hanging chads led to a prolonged legal dispute over recounts that lasted more than a month before George W. Bush was declared the president-elect.

“This is a really interesting experiment,” said Lee Horwich, managing editor for USA Today’s politics team. “I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. I don’t think any of us do. It seems like the right thing to do.”

The most useful stories of national interest will be highlighted on Electionland’s blog, and local partners are urged to tout their network on social media when they publish something inspired by a tip. Several of the members described the project as historic for the journalism industry given the collaboration across so many different newsrooms and despite the press’s inherent nature to fight over exclusives.

“The competitiveness of this is harder and harder to measure since everybody publishes everything they can confirm on Twitter, on Facebook, on whatever social platform you care to mention,” Horwich said. “The competitive advantage of being out 10 seconds, 3 minutes before others is not my top priority that day. My top priority is to get as complete a report and as accurate report as we possibly can.”

Journalists turning to a collaborative approach are doing so at the end of a 2016 presidential campaign unlike any other in modern times. Entire news organizations including the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and POLITICO have been banned at various times from attending Trump events, though those restrictions were later lifted. Crowds at the Republican’s rallies routinely boo and jeer at mainstream media outlets and the candidate’s traveling press corps. Fact checking has become a ubiquitous part of campaign coverage, while fake news articles maintain long shelf lives despite repeated attempts to debunk them and pledges by Facebook and Twitter to implement policies to address the issue. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in the media has hit its lowest level since Gallup polling on the topic started in 1972.

Against that backdrop, many news organizations will make election integrity issues a central part of their coverage plans, especially given accusations by the U.S. government of Russian cyber espionage and Trump’s evidence-less allegations of vote tampering and rigging.

At the networks, CBS has assigned its justice beat reporter to cover cyber and election hacking concerns on Election Day. Four NBC reporters will be on air covering voting irregularities, and it has a dedicated blog on the issue written by the author of a book on voter suppression.

“It’s going to be a shit show,” warned Brooke Binkowski, managing editor at Snopes, which is deploying about two dozen reporters and researchers for fact checking on internet hoaxes and other voting problems surrounding Election Day.

Another new startup aimed at helping the press and public to sift through the noise of Election Day is Votecastr, a partnership between data scientists, journalists and tech investors that plans to publish detailed projections Tuesday based off real-time turnout figures, combined with pre-polling surveys on voting preferences. The project will be pulling information from about 700 precincts in eight key battleground states -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania – and publishing on Slate. A live video steam of the analysis will be available on Vice Media.

Sasha Issenberg, one of the founding partners of the project, said the information can be useful to journalists looking for real-time evidence of polling problems. They would see signs if turnout levels are down at a precinct, which could suggest anything from broken voting machines to shortages on provisional ballots or intimidation.

“I hope that we are a generator of leads and hypotheses for reporters to chase,” he said.

While journalists may be encouraging the cross-newsroom partnerships and data and source sharing, they are also exposing themselves to heightened scrutiny from critics in Trump’s camp who may interpret their work as another example of the press trying to sabotage the Republican’s campaign.

“People will think even more what they always thought: the press is in collusion. We’re all one big group think. I think that can go either way depending on who you are talking to,” said Jane Elizabeth, a senior manager of the American Press Institute’s accountability journalism project.

“I’d hate to be in the middle of an election where this type of fact checking isn’t taking place,” she added. “You don’t know how much it’s going to help. But you don’t want to see the reverse side of that either.”