” Door Taylor Swift merchandise or a trash bag considering election propaganda in Kansas? What if you dress your child up as Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?

“In Texas, the owner of a used car dealership told his employees he would reimburse anyone who voted for $20 worth of food at one of several local restaurants. Is this illegal?

“Should we expect clashes between federal and state election observers in the polling stations?

“When are these three small Maryland counties supposed to count mail-in ballots?

These are just some of the questions asked – and answered – in a Slack for journalists created by the non-profit editorial team. Vote and funded by the Knight Foundation. The nearly 100 election experts available to answer voting-related questions include election administrators, nonprofit leaders, cybersecurity experts, public historians, election law attorneys, nonpartisan advocates from voter access, disinformation researchers, public policy professors, and more. More than 375 journalists had joined as of Monday and the help desk will remain open, at least until the “Safe Harbor” deadline by which states must have certified their votes early December.

Vote launched as a pop-up reporting project in 2020 And became a permanent editorial two years later. The nonprofit newsroom is part of Civic News Company, which is also the parent company of Chalk beat (which covers education) and Health Beat (launched this summer to cover public health). The Votebeat editorial team has five journalists in five states^{three editors and a dedicated engagement editor – as well as a handful of social and data staff members shared with Civic News Company’s other newsrooms. Their own cover, which is free to republishcovers and explains the mechanics of voting – so don’t expect polls or even election day results on the site.}

Editorial Director of Votebeat Jessica Husman led a similar collaborative project called Country of elections for ProPublica in 2016, 2018 and 2020. Four years ago, she noted, journalists weren’t asking about certification or worrying about how readers might respond to delays in communication of results. Journalists and election officials are “significantly better prepared” for this election, Huseman said. After all, the four years that followed brought us violence and riots linked to the certification of an electionHolocaust deniers organize to challenge future outcomesand a president attempt to overturn an election And repeatedly spreading false information about voters and results.

“I think this lesson has been fully learned between 2020 and today. You’d be hard-pressed to go to any news organization that covers elections responsibly — and I think most of them do — and not find an article saying, “Hey, we We may not know the results on election day. “, Huseman said. “In 2020, people were wondering, ‘Why are they still counting ballots? It’s weird. It’s a different media environment now.’

Huseman said Electionland had provided advice and ideas for potential stories to newsrooms in previous cycles, but this time she ignored it to focus on connecting journalists to news sources. high quality.

“Finding, verifying and disseminating information is a huge amount of work,” she said. Perhaps more importantly? “Journalists are better at choosing these stories anyway – the stories we suggest to them, they already do. What is most impactful for these journalists is simply giving them the right contact information, because I strongly believe that journalists write the right story when they talk to the right sources.

“The problem with voting stories is that the people who are most forthcoming don’t know what they’re talking about,” she added. “These are campaign operatives, or people with really good PR who send emails every three minutes. The last email in these journalists’ inboxes is from an underground cybertech company that wants to talk to them about cybersecurity, but the journalists are calling them to ask very specific questions about, for example, the use of electronic survey books in Chester County. Reducing the friction between the people who can answer these questions with this level of specificity and the journalists who have these questions is, I think, the best way to improve media coverage. »

When I arrived at Huseman’s house on the eve of the election, she was stocking up on a protein shake mixed with espresso. She had stocked up on food and new toys to entertain her dog, a handsome little guy named after Walter Cronkite, during his upcoming television appearances. She expects questions from reporters to peak Tuesday morning, and then again as polls close. (“We’re going to see a lot of questions about how long is a queue too long?” she noted. “By the way, the answer is half an hour.”)

Huseman expects coverage of the voting process to be more like a marathon than a sprint.

“We don’t expect the voting to end and people’s questions about voting to stop, because these candidates – and particularly the Trump campaign – are going to make statements about what happened or no,” Huseman said. said. Although “many of them are likely to be incorrect,” she added, “they will influence the confidence people have in the overall results.”

Journalists interested in joining Slack with election experts can still sign up here. (You will be asked to create a link to verify your identity, share your editor’s contact information, and link to previous reporting or your news organization’s ethics policy.)