“It behaves Taylor Swift goods or a garbage bag Given the ELECTION in Kansas? What happens if you dress your child up as Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?

“A used car dealership owner in Texas told his employees that he would reimburse anyone who voted for $20 worth of food at one of the local restaurants. Is it illegal?”

“We should expect clashes between federal and state election monitors at the polling stations?”

“When should these three small counties in Maryland count their mail-in ballots?”

These are just a few of the questions asked — and answered — in a Slack for journalists put together by the nonprofit newsroom. votebeat and funded by the Knight Foundation. The nearly 100 election experts on hand to answer voting-related questions include election administrators, nonprofit leaders, cybersecurity experts, public historians, election law attorneys, nonpartisan voter access advocates, disinformation researchers, policy professors public and many others. More than 375 journalists have joined since Monday, and the help desk will remain open at least through the “Safe Harbor” deadline by which states must have certified their votes at the beginning of December.

votebeat released as a 2020 pop-up reporting project and BECOME a permanent editorial two years later. The nonprofit newsroom is part of Civic News Company, which is also the parent company Chalkbeat (which covers education) and Healthbeat (launched this summer to cover public health). The Votebeat newsroom has five reporters in five states^{three editors and a dedicated engagement editor – plus a handful of social and data staff members shared with the other Civic News Company newsrooms. Their own coverage, that 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 Huseman ran a similar collaborative project called Electionland for ProPublica in 2016, 2018 and 2020. Four years ago, she noted, journalists weren’t asking questions about certification or worrying how readers might respond to delays in reporting the results. Both journalists and election officials are “significantly more prepared” for this election, Huseman said. The past four years have, after all, brought us violence and riots to certify electionsnegatively organization to challenge future resultsand a president the attempt to overturn the elections and repeatedly spreading false information about voters and results.

“I think that lesson has been fully learned between 2020 and today. You’d be hard-pressed to go to a news organization that responsibly covers elections — which I think is most of them — and not find a story (saying) “Hey, we might not know the results on election day”. Huseman said. “In 2020, people would be asking, ‘Why are they still counting ballots?’ It’s weird. It’s a different medium of news now.”

Huseman said Electionland has pitched tips and potential story ideas to newsrooms in previous cycles, but is skipping that this time around to focus on connecting reporters to high-quality sources.

“Finding, verifying and passing on tips is a huge amount of work,” she said. Perhaps more important? “Journalists are better off picking these stories anyway – the stories we’re suggesting, they’re already doing. The more impactful thing for these journalists is to give them only the right contact information, because I believe journalists write the right story when they talk to the right sources.”

“The problem with voting stories is that the people who are most available don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” she added. “They’re campaigners or really good PR people who send emails every three minutes. The last email in these reporters’ inboxes is from a fly-by-night cyber technology firm that wants to talk to them about cybersecurity, but the reporters are calling them with very specific questions about, how be, the use electronic survey books in Chester County. Reducing the friction between the people who can answer those questions at that level of specificity and the reporters who have those questions is, I think, the best way to improve coverage.”

When I arrived at Huseman’s on the eve of the election, she was filling up on a protein shake mixed with a shot of espresso. She had stocked up on food and new toys to distract her dog, a handsome boy named after Walter Cronkite, in her time future TV appearances. She expected questions from reporters to come in Tuesday morning and then again once the polls close. (“We’re going to see a lot of questions about how long is too long a line?” she noted. “The answer is half an hour, by the way.”)

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

“We don’t expect the vote to be over and people’s questions about the vote to stop, because these candidates — and the Trump campaign in particular — will be making claims about what went wrong and what didn’t go wrong,” Huseman. said. While “many of these are likely to be incorrect,” she added, “they will influence the confidence people have in the overall results.”

Reporters interested in joining Slack with election experts can still sign up Here. (You’ll be asked to link to verify your identity, share contact information for your editor, and link to past reports or your news organization’s ethics policy.)