Electionland: Covering access to the vote in real time

The Electionland newsroom

Electionland is a collaborative ProPublica project that covers voting, nationally and in real time. We partnered with newsrooms across the country, built a database of reliable, vetted tips and identified election administration problems in enough time for them to be addressed on Election Day.

From left: David Sleight, Jillian Kumagai, me and Setareh Baig, in the Electionland newsroom on Nov. 6. (📸: Mike Tigas)

I was the main production contact for Electionland 2018, working with the Electionland team, the design and production team and ProPublica editors to make sure training, preparation and day-of logistics went smoothly.

CUNY’s graduate school of journalism graciously let us use their newsroom on Election Day for this project. We tried to anticipate as many needs as we could, from thinking about training and publishing workflows to ethernet dongles and desks. I also hired a freelance photographer, Erin Lefevre, to document the project.

Election Day was one of our highest-volume publishing days of the year. We had four design and production team members onsite all day to produce stories, handle art research and help keep the site running well. I don’t often get to produce live, breaking news, so I loved the throwback to my daily-newsroom days. (And yes, there was pizza.)