This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and co-reported with NPR. This story also appeared in NPR ORLANDO, Fla. — Carolina Wassmer piloted a gray SUV around the city, dropping off canvassers from the civic engagement group Poder Latinx one by one. It was a muggy day, but the canvassers hopped out with their […]
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Posted inWho Counts?
How a data wrinkle led me to a story about disinformation and our democracy
I just wanted to get the latest version of Missouri’s voter registration database cleaned up to load into The Accountability Project, a database of 1.9 billion public records. Working on TAP is a part of my job here at the Center for Public Integrity as a data reporter for local initiatives. While I was preparing […]
Posted inWho Counts?
States ditched an election partnership. Voters will feel the consequences.
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Eric Fey is bracing for Election Day snarls because of a decision his state made last year. This story also appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Missouri pulled out of a collaboration known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which helps states keep voter rolls accurate — such as […]
Posted inElections
Resolutions for a free and fair 2024 election
It’s a big election year with an imposing backdrop: swirling misinformation, changing laws around voting and deep concerns about the health of American democracy. On top of a monumental presidential election, U.S. voters will select 11 governors, 34 U.S. Senators and 82 state supreme court justices, decide dozens of statewide ballot measures and choose literally […]
Posted inHigh Courts, High Stakes
America’s state supreme courts don’t look like America
Over the last three-plus decades, America’s state supreme courts have become less — not more — reflective of the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup. This story also appeared in USA TODAY That’s according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Fundraising ‘schemes’ investigated by Public Integrity lead to arrests
Two men investigated by the Center for Public Integrity for a story about groups that fundraise for causes like childhood leukemia but keep virtually all the money have been charged in connection with “schemes to defraud donors,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Richard Zeitlin, 53, and Robert […]
Posted inDemocracy
A Gen Z voting activist discusses the ‘war on youth’
Santiago Mayer moved to Southern California from Mexico City in 2017, around the time President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” was sparking nationwide protests. “I kept wanting to talk about it with people in my classes and with my friends,” Mayer said recently. “And I realized that many people either didn’t know what was happening, or […]
Posted inDemocracy
‘What the court misunderstood is just how fragile our democracy is’
It was a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For decades, it gave the federal government the power to shut down potentially discriminatory voting changes before they took effect. And on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted it. The court ruled that the formula behind the […]
Posted inDemocracy
Chicago’s FOIA Fest celebrates open government
Dozens of public records enthusiasts gathered Saturday to kick-off an annual Chicago tradition: FOIA Fest, a public records conference created to celebrate Sunshine Week, which ends today. FOIA — short for Freedom of Information Act — is a federal law that requires the full or partial disclosure of unreleased documents and information controlled by the […]
Posted inWho Counts?
How one city ended prison gerrymandering
This story is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and Bolts. The Howard R. Young Correctional Institution sits between a creek and Interstate 495 in Wilmington, Delaware. For the last ten years, the prison’s 1,281 residents were counted as constituents of Wilmington’s third city council district. But when local officials sat down to […]
Posted inDemocracy
What voter turnout shows, and hides, about elections
The voter turnout in 2020 was a stunning 67%, according to one source. Another had it at 94%. A third fixed 2020 voter turnout at 63%. All three are correct — because they do the math differently. They’re comparing actual voters with the number of eligible voters, registered voters and Americans of voting age, respectively. […]
Posted inWho Counts?
Voters in jail face ‘de facto disenfranchisement’
Each election cycle, thousands of eligible voters are effectively disenfranchised because they sit in a jail cell. Americans detained before trials are allowed to vote, a status affirmed by a 1974 Supreme Court case. As a matter of law, pretrial detainees are presumed innocent and retain the voting rights they had before being charged with […]
Posted inDemocracy
Indigenous journalists make way for sunshine
This story also appeared in The Investigative Reporting Workshop Lori Edmo just wanted to find out how her tribe was spending federal COVID-19 relief money. As a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeastern Idaho, she knew her tribal government had received more than $17 million in CARES Act funding […]
Posted inDemocracy
New anti-protest laws cast a long shadow on First Amendment rights
This story also appeared in HuffPost and Indian Country Today Tiffany Crutcher was worried. Oklahoma lawmakers had passed a new measure stiffening penalties for protesters who block roadways and granting immunity to drivers who unintentionally hit them. The state NAACP, saying the law was passed in response to racial justice demonstrations and could chill the […]
Posted inDemocracy
Pro-Trump nonprofit gives millions to groups boosting his agenda
A nonprofit closely tied to former President Donald Trump and his administration gave millions of dollars in 2020 to an array of conservative groups, a new tax filing from the nonprofit, now called America First Works, shows. The largest grant to an outside group, nearly $4.8 million, went to Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund often […]
Posted inVeterans Charities
Donors file class action lawsuit against Las Vegas telemarketer alleging scam PAC scheme
Political donors filed a class action lawsuit this week against Richard Zeitlin, a Las Vegas-based telemarketer they accuse of facilitating a “massive money-making scheme.” Zeitlin was the focus of an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity in 2019. The lawsuit alleges Zeitlin and his companies violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by “siphoning … […]
Posted inDemocracy
Texas abortion law reflects GOP turn towards citizen enforcement
The new Texas law effectively banning nearly all abortions in the state relies on private citizens to enforce it, the highest-profile example of a growing push by Republicans to give supporters broad power to sue over issues important to their base. A Tennessee law allows any student, teacher or employee to sue if they are […]
Posted inDemocracy
Redistricting will always be contentious. Ask Arizona.
This story also appeared in HuffPost Some of the written public comments flowing into Arizona’s independent redistricting commission during its April 27 meeting struck similar notes: Arizonans describing themselves as transplants to the state, worried about the partisan ties of one of the companies bidding to handle the high-stakes redrawing of political maps. “I moved […]
Posted inBarriers to the Ballot Box
Tight deadline, savvy pitch: How one red state expanded access to the ballot
This story was published in partnership with HuffPost. On the afternoon of January 21, a group of public officials gathered in Kentucky’s Capitol in Frankfort for a delicate conversation about changing how the state conducts elections. Masked and spread out in a room typically used for committee hearings, they didn’t have much time. There were only […]
Posted inBarriers to the Ballot Box
Georgia Republicans want to reshape voting laws, burdening voters of color
Stephanie Lopez-Burgos stood in line about 35 minutes when she went to vote early in Georgia’s Senate runoff election and felt lucky it wasn’t longer. She saw social media posts from many Hall County residents who waited more than an hour — some of whom had to leave without voting. This story also appeared in […]
Posted inDemocracy
Analysis: Threats to democracy on Inauguration Day, and the lies that got us here
This is a news analysis from the Center for Public Integrity. Today’s inauguration, part of the ritual of American democracy, is offset by images usually associated with a coup. Thousands of armed National Guard members are juxtaposed with the monuments and symbols that tell the American story. The Washington Monument. The Lincoln Memorial. And the […]
Posted inDemocracy
Corporate America presses pause on political contributions
Weeks before a 2018 special U.S. Senate election in Mississippi, a video came out in which Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Mississippi Republican running for the seat, could be heard saying that if a political supporter “invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Her comments set off a furor. Corporate donors […]
Posted inBarriers to the Ballot Box
Trump-backing nonprofit gave millions to groups registering voters in swing states, tax filing shows
A nonprofit created to support President Donald Trump and his administration gave more than $2 million in 2019 to newly formed groups whose contacts with voters came under investigation in both Florida and North Carolina this year, according to a new tax filing from the group, America First Policies. America First Policies’ president is named […]
Posted inBarriers to the Ballot Box
Across the country, voters remove racist symbols and language from founding documents
More than a century ago, white Mississippians devised a way to almost guarantee that no African American — or Black residents’ preferred candidate — would ever hold real political power in the state. It’s among the discriminatory measures voters changed across the country last week. After months of unrest sharpened the nation’s attention to racial […]
Posted inBarriers to the Ballot Box
Native Americans, hit hard by COVID-19, faced major barriers to vote
Leatrice Hendricks had 90 minutes to turn in absentee ballots from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation to the clerk’s office in Corson County, South Dakota. She had stopped by 25 homes where fellow tribal members were quarantined with COVID-19, driving for hours to get the ballots to them. Hendricks waited outside as voters filled […]
Posted inBarriers to the Ballot Box
After historic early voting surge, fewer hiccups on Election Day
POMEROY, Pa. — In Chester County, a hotly contested Philadelphia suburb, Republicans and Democrats agreed on one thing: the need to help voters find their polling place after the county sent a last-minute notification listing an incorrect location. Barbara Skowood, the Republican committee person for the Valley South precinct, posted laminated signs and made dozens […]
Posted inNewsletters
The painful, winding path toward a more perfect union
This is a news analysis from the Center for Public Integrity. Early Wednesday morning, Americans went to bed in the middle of a political cliffhanger. The main character in peril is our democracy. This summer, we grappled with a racial justice reckoning. Now, we’re reckoning with our democracy, though the issues are really inseparable. Days before […]
Posted inElections
Michigan set to investigate potential attempt to ‘suppress’ Flint voters
This story was published in partnership with Flint Beat. This story also appeared in Flint Beat Flint, Michigan — Following a warning from Michigan leaders about robocalls giving false information to voters, Flint community leaders took to social media to spread the truth, and state officials say an investigation is to come. This morning, Michigan Attorney General […]
Posted inUS Polling Places
The District of Columbia learned how to run an election in a pandemic
The District of Columbia had a rough primary election. The Board of Elections encouraged people to vote by mail and then opened only 20 polling stations instead of the usual 143. The flood of requests for mail-in ballots overwhelmed election staff, who received more than 15 times the number of applications they normally do. Some […]
Posted inUS Polling Places
South Carolina’s history of disenfranchisement looms over tight U.S. Senate race
Multiple legal battles have played out this fall over how South Carolina will process absentee ballots, with mixed results, and with one case going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. More than 1.1 million mail-in ballots had been cast in the state as of five days before the election, compared with 133,000 by […]
