Votebeat becomes a permanent newsroom ahead of 2022 midterms

The nonprofit organization started as a pop-up shop in 2020 to cover election administration

Votebeat staff from left, top: Editor-in-Chief Chad Lorenz, Story Editor Carrie Levine, Editorial Director Jessica Huseman, Engagement Editor Lauren Aguirre. Bottom row, from left: Votebeat Michigan Senior Reporter Oralandar Brand-Williams, Votebeat Texas Reporter Natalia Contreras and Reporter Jen Fifield.
Votebeat staff from left, top: Editor-in-Chief Chad Lorenz, Story Editor Carrie Levine, Editorial Director Jessica Huseman, Engagement Editor Lauren Aguirre. Bottom row, from left: Votebeat Michigan Senior Reporter Oralandar Brand-Williams, Votebeat Texas Reporter Natalia Contreras and Reporter Jen Fifield.
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The biggest decisions in American politics start with those made in much smaller geographic areas: states, counties and voting precincts.

The founders of Votebeat knew that educating the public on election administration required journalists on the ground with deep community knowledge and that their work required local news partners with established credibility among their readers. What they didn’t know was how much work there was to do.

“A lot of people don’t have a lot of information on elections, and so that vacuum is filled with nonsense,” said Votebeat’s co-founder and general manager, Alison Go. “It’s just filling a yawning gap in coverage that there really is a civic demand for.”

Votebeat was started as a pop-up shop in the months leading up to the 2020 election and became a permanent newsroom in the summer of 2022 after its parent company, the education publisher Chalkbeat, raised $3.1 million in funding. Both Votebeat and Chalkbeat are nonprofit news organizations with reporters on the ground covering the “nuts and bolts” of their beats in their communities. Chalkbeat’s leaders saw disinformation running rampant in 2020 voting and saw an opportunity to apply Chalkbeat’s model to the voting process.

“What we saw was pretty terrifying things happening in the landscape with truth and democracy,” Go said. “We have to try to do this because if not us, who else?”

Today, Votebeat reporters are on the ground in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Texas — four states they chose because they saw both urgent needs and significant opportunities to make an impact. They have partnerships with nonprofit news organizations, including Spotlight PA, Bridge Michigan and The Texas Tribune.

Go said their initial plan was to evaluate whether there was a need to continue Votebeat in January 2021. On January 6, 2021, they had a definitive answer.

“The clear answer was yes,” she said.

The insurrection spurred by the “Big Lie” was just the breaking news story. The fallout and symptoms are stories that Votebeat continues to report, along with changes that have taken place since then, shakeups in election administration and new legislative actions. Readers are learning that there are many gaps in their knowledge of the election process and have questions Votebeat wants to answer.

“One of my biggest surprises is how big this story has turned out to be,” said Editor-in-Chief Chad Lorenz.

What Votebeat is — and what it is not

Votebeat does not publish Election Day results. They leave the Election Night scramble and newsroom pizza to their local news partners. They also stay away from reporting on political polling and candidates. Instead, Votebeat has a laser focus on its beat: “reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.”

Votebeat’s leaders said they are pleasantly surprised that readers care enough about the voting process to find and read their often-technical articles. They are excited by readers using Votebeat’s reporting to fact-check what they may have been reading or hearing elsewhere.

“I love the idea that people want to do a Google search about what a vote tabulator is and how they know it’s not switching votes,” said Editor-in-Chief Chad Lorenz.

Among the articles readers have been searching for is an explainer on the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). The program sends elections officials reports on voters who may have moved out of state, which officials can verify to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. That particular article began as a way to correct false information about the program. The Gateway Pundit published a series of blog posts, which gave fodder to conspiracy theorists who falsely believed ERIC was perpetuating the potential voter fraud that it prevents.

The ERIC article is also an example of how Votebeat is filling gaps in coverage and how well it can beat out misinformation on search results. A Google search for “Electronic Registration Information Center” shows Votebeat’s article as the first news result and the third overall result behind ERIC itself.

Making a Votebeat story

Votebeat was started as a pop-up shop in the months leading up to the 2020 election and became a permanent newsroom in the summer of 2022 after its parent company, the education publisher Chalkbeat, raised $3.1 million in funding. The nonprofit newsroom has journalists on the ground in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Texas — four states with urgent voter information needs.

Votebeat’s central tenet is to produce journalism that impacts by strengthening elections, improving the voting process and improving voting access for all through informed action and informed debate, Lorenz said.

“We’re not just sending journalism out there and hoping that it does some good,” he said.

Instead, they measure the impact that their stories are making. Informed action can be a policy change made after a story was published or a move officials made to hold someone accountable. Informed debate is when the public begins talking about solutions based on a piece of journalism, such as citing an article in a public meeting, a public statement or a public document, Lorenz said.

In developing stories, they ask themselves questions like: “Will it be additive in this location? Are we chasing a story that everyone has already been chasing? Is there an opportunity for us to do distinctive journalism? What impact do we see the story making? How could that impact strengthen elections or make them fairer? How will the public engage with our story and take more action? Are we telling a distinctive story and creating an impact in a way that no one else is?”

“If the answers are yes, then we have a Votebeat story,” Lorenz said.

One of their biggest successes was a story from Potter County, Texas, by Jessica Huseman, who is now Votebeat’s editorial director. She learned through her local sources that the Potter County Republican Party planned to conduct its own election during the primary, independent of the county election administration. The local party chair planned to eliminate voting centers, use hand-marked ballots and hand-count votes. The chair believed the measure would make the voting process more secure.

Huseman’s article detailed the ways that process would make fraud and inaccuracies more likely.

The New York Times wrote its own version of the story, crediting Votebeat with the scoop, and officials pressured the county Republican chair to reverse course.

He did.

“In that way, our story prevented what would have been a really problematic election,” Lorenz said.

Filling a civic need

While stories like Huseman’s Potter County article keep officials in check and prevent potential election problems, Votebeat also fills the public's knowledge gap.

“To this day, people don’t understand that elections are run locally,” Go said.

Chad Lorenz is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief.

Lorenz said he thinks people are becoming more aware that they know too little about the voting process. “That’s my thesis, and I am frequently seeing evidence of that,” he said. “I think we’re in an era where people want to understand elections better. They want to learn more.”

He said election administration is complex, and the public needs to know more about the process and the safeguards in place regardless of voting methods like mail-in voting and drop boxes. Because many people only vote once every four years, they don’t spend much time thinking about the details of the process, he said.

"This was not a thing that people think about, and thus it’s not a system that gets covered year-round," Lorenz said.

Go said that people are less suspicious of the process when they understand they often know the people managing their elections.

“The people that oversee elections are the county clerks, in many counties, who also gave you the deed to your car,” she said. “They already have that kind of interpersonal trust, so all you are doing is building on top of that. It’s not some big, bad machine running your election. It’s a succession of people, mainly women, who run things in the county, who you interact with often, and once a year, they handle elections.”

Votebeat reporters participate in a two-week training program that includes information on voting rights, rules for poll workers and technical information, like the differences between the types of voting machines. Huseman, formerly of ProPublica’s Electionland, developed the training, which allows Votebeat reporters to start the job from a level of expertise.

Lorenz said voters are seeing that voting is becoming a political issue, like gun rights and abortion rights. “Now there are political fights just about the process of voting. People want to engage from an informed point of view,” he said. “I want people to hunger for information about elections.”

Votebeat’s permanent newsroom

Votebeat has a virtual newsroom with one reporter in each state and a national editor’s desk. The team interacts daily through Slack social channels and also meets for personal development, team exercise and meditation.  

Votebeat does “light coordination” with its local partners on stories to ensure the topic is not already being covered, Go said. The articles are available for reprint, and Lorenz said he loves it when he sees another publication has printed their story. “We encourage republishing, and sometimes we actively pursue it,” he said. “We give that information away for free, which usually means it’s reprinted by local organizations, so it’s a perfect fit.”

Many of their readers find Votebeat stories in their local publications. Other readers are elections administrators and other stakeholders in the field. Votebeat stories are often curated by platforms focused on elections, Lorenz said.  

Votebeat’s plans for the midterm and beyond

Lorenz said their next step is to “harness the power of our network into national-level narratives” as the reporters in their permanent newsroom become established in their beats.

Votebeat’s editors and reporters closely follow developments that could harm future elections. Lorenz said many elections officials who deeply cared about their work and election integrity have left their jobs or have plans to leave soon.

“That creates some real problems,” Lorenz said. He said they are monitoring places where this is happening, who is stepping in to replace them, and what impact it will have. Where they see disinformation, they plan on debunking it. But ideally, Lorenz said that they want to get ahead of the disinformation before it is spread.

“Without giving too much away, I can tell you our plan for the midterms is mostly to focus on the threats to election administration at very local levels — to ring alarm bells and explain these threats with nuance,” he said.

He said they also plan to write “voter-focused pieces” explaining new laws and processes in Arizona and Texas, where new legislation has affected voting rules.

Beyond the midterms, they want to grow both the number of reporters in each community and the number of communities they serve. Go and Lorenz both said that there seems to be an infinite number of stories to cover.

“It seems like we’re a niche publication, but actually the story is huge, and it’s more than one reporter in each state can cover,” Lorenz said. “There’s no end to the kinds of stories we can do.”

He noted that because the scope of their mission is massive, understanding the process must also be overwhelming to voters.

“Imagine how intimidating that must be, from a voter’s point of view,” he said. “There are a million questions that are faced by every voter. Then, it’s a matter of what do we triage, what matters most and then there is so much more left on the table.”

“I am looking forward to the day that Votebeat has more reporters and can do even more," he added.

Alyssa Choiniere is an Editor & Publisher contributor. She is a journalist based in southwestern Pennsylvania covering a variety of topics including industry news and criminal justice.

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