My news organization, Texas Watchdog, found thousands of dead people on our local county's voter rolls and dozens whose names may have been used to cast ballots after their deaths. We couldn't have conducted the investigation without the IRE and NICAR Boot Camp training in Columbia, Mo. Our story prompted local officials to remove two voters from the rolls whose names were used to vote after their deaths, and the story generated interest on the Drudge Report and Instapundit Web sites. Officials in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, have promised to meet with us post-election and have pledged ...

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Early this past fall, our group of journalists and developers at The New York Times began to assemble the data necessary to produce our election guide, which would not only focus on the presidential race but also include races for the U.S. House and Senate. Getting information about political candidates was a bit tricky given that we wanted to make sure we had details for viable candidates where they existed. We turned to Project Vote Smart, which not only has been compiling such data for years but also recently released an API, or application programming interface, that makes accessing ... Read more ...

In late October, about midway through the early voting period of this year’s general election, I stumbled upon an interesting “Voters Voted” link on the Hidalgo County Elections Department Web site. The link was a compressed file containing five Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, each of which listed information about who had voted during the two week early voting period. I immediately knew there was something to be done with this data on thousands of Hidalgo County voters. My newspaper, The Monitor, is based in McAllen, Texas, just a few minutes north of the Mexican border. We serve a population of ...

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The 2008 Election Day is upon us! IRE and NICAR have compiled a list of resources to aid in your coverage of stories as they unfold on this historic election day.  Included you will find relevant tipsheets and stories, databases, articles on election coverage from Uplink and The IRE Journal, and other helpful websites. Please contact the IRE Resource Center (573-882-3364 or email) or the Database Library (573-884-7711) for additional assistance.

Now that it’s high political season, it’s a perfect time to prepare for reporting on the election. If you take a few steps to get ready, you’ll be able to cut through the spin on election night and the days after and show how the candidates fared in your area. So, here are some tips for laying the foundation now:

• Figure out which stories you want to tell in depth. There are a bunch of options. You might want to focus on the presidential race in this monumental year to see how your area stacks up to ...

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The 2008 Republican National Convention, which was held four blocks from our office in downtown St. Paul, was the biggest event this newspaper has covered in a good number of years. We knew that organization would be a key to making sure everything went smoothly. We ended up harnessing some CAR power to make that a bit easier. To be sure, there are probably dozens of other things we could have done if given the time and resources. Not having covered an event like this before, most of those involved weren’t quite sure what to expect or what we ... Read more ...

There are more than 300 million people in the United States scattered across 3.79 million square miles. Those numbers speak to a diverse and complicated country. And yet every four years the nation’s political coverage falls into the trap of simply breaking that complex tapestry into 50 states and coloring them red or blue. Most journalists know, if not through experience then intuitively, this understanding of the American electorate is flawed. It captures none of the nuance and subcultures of most states. There are many Michigans in Michigan and many Georgias in Georgia. Defining them as one solid ... Read more ...

My editors at USA Today asked me to scrutinize Barack Obama's fundraising. Obama had portrayed himself as independent of special interests. But were his big donors and fundraisers really so different from those of other candidates? I started by examining the bundlers – the folks who gather up checks from their family, friends, business associates and social networks. One thing immediately jumped out: Obama's policy of refusing contributions and fundraising help from Washington lobbyists was not nearly as far-reaching as one might imagine. Going down the list, I could see that many bundlers were partners at law firms with ... Read more ...