Reporters will examine interference, ballot delays and candidate records
Deployment and monitoring plan
ProPublica said it spent the past few weeks preparing reporters and editors to cover every scenario it could imagine for the Nov. 3 midterms and the days beyond. The outlet described forecasting as an uncomfortable task and said it was not its strong suit. It cited the record that journalists are good at telling readers what happened when they have time and data to sift through, but much less good at forecasting the future.
ProPublica will put reporters on the ground in 11 key states covering voting, with even more in Washington, D.C., and others on standby. Its reporters have detailed what experts will watch. The outlet said elections are no longer confined to Election Day because early voting and voting by mail constitute a huge share of the electorate, and its plans for covering voting stretch back many months.
Across its newsroom-wide coverage, ProPublica said reporters are looking for what is going right as well as what is not. The newsroom is monitoring voter suppression and interference, election observers and poll watchers, extremism tied to the election, and ICE activity at the polls.
Election security and voting access
Over the past year, ProPublica said it tried to use the techniques of accountability journalism to add new facts about the election. The outlet focused considerable attention on election mechanics, which it described as a once-arcane issue that has become a central aspect of the MAGA movement’s argument that Trump’s 2020 loss was “rigged” by his opponents.
ProPublica reported that it examined how the Trump administration depleted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal arm charged with safeguarding election systems. The outlet discovered that Department of Homeland Security officials had asked CISA to obtain a voting machine and hack it without informing the manufacturer of any vulnerabilities found. The plan was not acted on, but its existence made CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. CISA and DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions. A White House spokesperson said Trump “has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
Another ProPublica investigation examined how delays resulting from U.S. Postal Service cost-cutting measures endangered the validity of mail-in ballots in rural counties, typically Republican strongholds, during this year’s primaries. The Postal Service said such delays were less likely in the general election.
One of ProPublica’s most detailed election investigations traced the career of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who spearheaded legal attacks on the 2020 results. Mitchell leads a coalition of what she calls “election believers” — people who scour voting results for errors they believe point to larger conspiracies. Changes she had hoped Trump could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts.
ProPublica said Mitchell had nonetheless become “the voice of a well-funded national movement, one which has the president’s ear.” The outlet’s reporting strongly suggested she would be among the people Trump listened to when weighing how to respond after this week’s vote. ProPublica said it asked to speak with Mitchell multiple times; she declined but responded by email: “What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.” A White House spokesperson said she had no official role in election policy but was an effective private advocate.
ProPublica described the moment as one of uncertainty in its history as a democracy. The outlet said Trump had made “his willingness to smear news organizations an essential aspect of his appeal,” routinely insulted reporters to their face and attempted to ban some outlets from the White House and Air Force One because he disliked the stories they wrote about him. The outlet also said Trump had diverted hundreds of federal agents from jobs fighting drug cartels and organized crime to search for evidence that noncitizens had illegally voted in federal elections; hardly any were found.
Candidate and congressional investigations
Alongside its election-mechanics reporting, ProPublica said it spent time on traditional investigative reporting, looking closely at candidates’ records in public office. The outlet said a newsroom like it cannot cover every race and therefore focuses its resources on areas where it has particular expertise.
ProPublica’s Texas team had covered state Attorney General Ken Paxton for years and maintained its focus after he announced a run for the U.S. Senate. The team’s review of Paxton’s travels found that only 1 in 6 of nearly 1,000 out-of-state trips were linked to official duties. Texas taxpayers paid $3.3 million for Paxton’s security detail to accompany him. Paxton did not answer ProPublica’s questions, but his office said he “faced numerous security threats.” ProPublica said the findings had become an issue in his Senate campaign.
Another line of ProPublica’s election coverage arose from an investigation that was “seemingly not related to the midterms”: its examination of the Trump administration’s handling of the Justice Department. The outlet began many months ago looking for promising cases that had been dropped and found that the FBI had been looking into pay-to-play allegations involving prominent Democratic and Republican members of Congress. The case included a bipartisan list of political figures such as Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was running in a closely contested race this year, and leading Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, who was also on the ballot this year.
ProPublica’s first story said Collins had helped a little-known defense contractor win millions in federal contracts while the company’s CEO helped bankroll her 2020 reelection effort through a donation made via a shell company. A second story said the FBI was examining interactions involving Clyburn and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July, with the same contractor. Collins denied all wrongdoing. Clyburn’s office said, “A donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” while Graham’s communications director wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior … are simply false.” ProPublica reported that the FBI stopped examining the allegations after Trump “purged the bureau,” and the outlet said the coverage had become an issue in the Maine race.
Alaska litigation and the 2020-to-2024 retrospective
ProPublica highlighted spending by wealthy donors, moves by both parties to redraw congressional district lines, and questions by President Donald Trump and his allies about whether results could be trusted before a single ballot was counted. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit saying the federal government would contest any outcome in which Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska was not victorious. The outlet described the broader challenge for newsrooms as covering “an election in which the losing side refuses to accept the will of the voters,” and asked whether the Alaska lawsuit was a single data point or a harbinger. ProPublica reported that a federal judge dismissed the suit to block the Alaska Senate race results over the weekend and said the Trump administration’s plans to appeal stood on shaky legal ground.
The newsroom said it had not forgotten the 2020 election, when advisers urged Trump to send the military to seize voting machines in states he had lost. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as lawmakers gathered to certify Joe Biden’s victory also remained part of that history. Yet none of the scenarios the newsroom prepared for a possible close election in November 2024 came to pass, and Trump decisively prevailed.
Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief and founding managing editor from 2008-2012, said he was deeply reluctant to predict how all this would end. He committed the outlet to continuing its reporting: “The one thing I know for certain is that we will keep digging into the story of what really happened in this election, whoever wins.”