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Deceased voters cast ballots in Harris County, Tex.
An analysis by TexasWatchdog.com matched information from Harris County, Tex. voter rolls to Social Security death data and found ballots had been cast in the names of dead people more than 40 times since 2004. They also found more than 4,000 people currently on the voter rolls who, according to the Social Security death data,…
Read MoreTrial lawyers offer continued support to Biden
Jonathan D. Salant of Bloomberg News reports that trial-lawyer firms are among the biggest lifetime donors to Senator Joe Biden. Biden has been a reliable vote for them in the Senate even when fellow Democrats Barack Obama and Edward Kennedy went the other way.
Read MoreLarge firms awarded small business contracts by U.S. agencies
An analysis by The Washington Post found “U.S. government agencies made at least $5 billion in mistakes in their recent reports of contracts awarded to small businesses, with many claiming credit for awards to companies that long ago outgrew the designation or never qualified in the first place.” The Post looked at sample data from…
Read MoreQuick-hit CAR success
Little more than a week after enduring days of spreadsheet and database training, recent graduates of IRE’s Boot Camp in Minneapolis have produced quick-hit stories with their new computer-assisted reporting skills. An analysis by Jason Hoppin of The Pioneer Press found new voter registrations in Minnesota have pushed that state’s registrations to an all-time high.…
Read MorePollution credits profitable for landfills
Jeffrey Ball of the Wall Street Journal reports that landfills all over the country may be capitalizing off the sale of carbon credits for environmental initiatives they already had in place. A pollution credit allows a company to offset their own “carbon footprint” by purchasing credits earned by others for their green initiatives. “The credit…
Read MoreCampaigns benefiting from large donors
The latest campaign finance disclosures point to a proliferation of large donors supporting candidates and their parties and much of that money is coming from donors with interests in Washington, according to a report by Michael Luo and Griff Palmer of The New York Times. Fine print in campaign finance laws allow for larger donations…
Read MoreTobacco Underground series
A six-part investigative series by The Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) details the booming global trade in illegal cigarettes. Since 1999, the ICIJ has tracked the illegal tobacco trade, and found corporate collusion with the criminal networks diverting tobacco shipments to black markets around the world. Crackdowns starting in 2004…
Read MoreKnow Parking Here series
A project by CTV-British Columbia and ESRI Canada mapped parking ticket trends in Vancouver. Through a freedom of information request, CTV received digital copies of all the parking tickets issued during a two-week period and analysed the information to determine numerous trends including spikes in ticketing at certain points in the day and neighborhoods where…
Read MoreLAPD paying too much in overtime
Jason Kandel of the Los Angeles Daily News reports that overtime pay for Los Angeles police officers has increased almost 150 percent in the past decade. According to department records, the LAPD has spent more than its allotted overtime budget by an average of nearly $6 million a year since 2002-03. The report comes on…
Read MorePrecision Journalism 101
Listen to Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, and Philip Meyer, recently retired Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, discuss the past and future of precision journalism. They share examples of how social science techniques and advances in personal computing have given journalists the tools to…
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