Covering voter access in 2020

I published front-page stories with USA Today showing how clerks across the country were struggling to hold elections due to the unprecedented volume of mail-in ballots, a lack of resources & time, and why fewer ballots were rejected but experts still anticipated a new wave of restrictive voting laws for 2021.

President Trump has falsely stated multiple times that absentee ballot fraud is a threat to the 2020 election. It's not. We debunked a conservative foundation's catalog of absentee ballot fraud which is often used to support this lie. Our reporting was also part of the PBS Frontline documentary 'Whose Vote Counts' which aired in October 2020 and was awarded a 2021 George Foster Peabody Award.

Apart from doing national stories we partnered up with local media taking a closer look at state-specific issues around voter access. Together with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel we revealed a system leaking from all sides during Wisconsin's election in April — buckling under the weight of a global pandemic and partisan bickering that kept the logistics of election day up in the air until less than a day before polls opened. Moreover, we interviewed more than 50 clerks across Wisconsin finding that many are concerned about a repeat of the state's messy April primary.