Elections
New IRE series dives deep on election coverage
With the 2024 elections right around the corner, IRE is offering a new series of webinars, workshops, panels and hands-on classes to help equip journalists to better cover local, state and federal elections.
Read MoreIowa state senator’s National Guard service not the only reason she missed votes
United States Senate candidate and state senator Joni Ernst has cited her National Guard duty to rebuff criticism for missing more than half of the votes in the Iowa Senate this year. In a WHO-TV interview posted on April 7, the Red Oak Republican acknowledged that National Guard service wasn’t the only reason she’s missed…
Read MoreFifteen felons voted in 2010 Maryland gubernatorial election
Though felons are prohibited from voting in Maryland, 15 of them cast ballots in the 2010 gubernatorial election, according to a recently released audit. The finding in an Office of Legislative Audits’ report criticized the State Board of Elections, saying the agency “did not have an effective process to ensure that individuals serving a sentence…
Read MoreHidden cash fueled Warren campaign
“Long before the term “Super PAC” entered the national lexicon of campaign finance, unauthorized committees — those acting in support of but without the expressed approval of candidates — gave donors a means to skirt limits that New York places on those donating directly to candidates.”
Read MoreMinneapolis mayor’s race lags in disclosing campaign contributions
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports: “If candidates for mayor of Minneapolis were running in Boston, they would file a report online of their campaign contributions every two weeks for six months before the election. If they were running in Seattle? Once a week. And in a range of other cities with a mayoral election this fall, they…
Read MoreSecret files reveal how pay-to-play works in N.J.
A special report by The Star-Ledger exposes how one politically connected engineering firm parlayed campaign donations into millions of dollars in public contracts, all the while keeping the scheme hidden from the public. An analysis of the records, meticulously kept and numbering 137 pages, found Birdsall made more than 1,000 secret campaign contributions worth in…
Read MoreU-T San Diego may have offered bargain ad deals to candidates they endorsed.
Tom Shephard, a political consultant for Bob Filner, a Democrat running for mayor of San Diego, noticed a lot of full page newspaper ads attacking his client; ads that he was quoted $8,000 for. “Amita Sharma and Ryann Growchowski, with inewsource and KPBS, audited ads in the San Diego Union-Tribune every day between Labor Day…
Read MoreThe Case of the phantom ballots: an electoral whodunit
“Within 2½ weeks, 2,552 online requests arrived from voters who had not applied for absentee ballots. They streamed in much too quickly for real people to be filling them out. They originated from only a handful of Internet Protocol addresses. And they were not random. It had all the appearances of a political dirty trick,…
Read MoreHundreds of millions of dollars spent on election in CA alone
“Now that Tuesday’s election is over, CaliforniaWatch did an analysis to find out how much money was pumped into the political battles over California’s eleven propositions.” “The total they found was $363 million or $20 in political spending for each of California’s 18.2 million registered voters.”
Read MoreFelons, dead people are eligible voters on final Palm Beach County roll
“Peter Costello, a felon convicted of racketeering and fraud in 1998, has no right to vote because his civil rights never have been restored.But that didn’t stop the registered Republican from casting a ballot in the Aug. 14 primary, and, he said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post, submitting an absentee ballot for…
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