The Election SOS newsletter is a dedicated resource for journalists covering the 2020 election and its aftermath. We provide critical resources to help with your coverage, safety and service.
Rapid Response Fund: Round 2
Did you apply for our Rapid Response Fund yet? We still have funds left to support your election coverage needs, and expect to distribute the remaining grants by the end of this week, so you'll want to get your request in soon! You can also read our Medium piece to learn how we distributed the first $100K.
Last week, we hosted a campaign finance webinar with Karl Evers-Hillstrom, OpenSecrets.org’s money-in-politics reporter, and Jeremy B. Merrill, a data journalist whose work has appeared in ProPublica. The two discussed upcoming campaign finance filings and outside spending (super PACs, dark money, etc.) and offered insights on what to look for in Georgia specifically.
Have you heard of the art of pre-suasion? The Guardian provides the five most common tactics favored by conspiracy theorists and the best ways to respond to them. While the article focuses on pandemic conspiracies, the same tactics can be seen from election misinformation spreaders.
Just over half of Democrats (54%) say their news sources helped them understand the election results, 21% of Republicans say the same about their news consumption. In addition, about a third of U.S. adults (36%) say they followed the results of the presidential election “almost constantly,” according to a Pew Research Center survey of 11,818 U.S. adults conducted Nov. 12-17, 2020, as a part of the Center’s American News Pathways project.
America has never felt so divided. But most Americans are tired of this "us-versus-them" mindset and are eager to find common ground. A year-long project of More in Common launched in October 2018 conducted a polarization study with more than 8,000 Americans. They found that more than three in four Americans believe that our differences aren’t so great that we can’t work together. To better report on political polarization, learn what is pulling us apart, and find what can bring us back together.
Covering national stories, protests, elections and the pandemic might have major impacts on reporters, leading to issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and, more likely, anxiety, stress and burnout. IJN offers tips on how journalists can address their own mental health, including things like remembering that you are not immune to the emotional impact and the importance of taking downtime and creating assertive boundaries to prevent burnout.
The hearing was not announced on the court’s docket and appeared not to have been open to the press or public. It seems to have focused on claims that the election results in Georgia were wildly inaccurate due to the use of machines from a leading vendor of voting equipment — Dominion Election Systems.
A significant number of Americans currently believe the 2020 election was stolen, even though it wasn’t. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week showed 52 percent of Republicans believe President Trump “rightfully won” the election. But the only “evidence” of election fraud has been widely debunked. An optimist might think the public will gradually drop this election fraud myth as the Trump campaign’s lawsuits are thrown out, recounts and audits are conducted, and, eventually, Joe Biden is sworn in as president. But we’ve seen Trump try to falsely claim a president is illegitimate before, as he spent years claiming without evidence that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus ineligible to be president. If this recent saga is anything like the birtherism movement, it’s not going anywhere.
A range of pending decisions, moves and countermoves now stands between governments, voters and their ballots in upcoming races, meaning the environment likely will continue to evolve even as the big players — the United States, Russia, China and others — likely stay the same. Here are some of the unresolved issues as the clock begins to tick toward Americans voting again in large numbers, including in important U.S. Senate runoff elections early next year in Georgia.
Election SOS Fellows Reporting Highlights:
Thanks to generous support from our funders, we've matched 39 fellows to support 20 newsrooms in battleground states. Check out the great work they're doing.
Elections are not over. We'd love to know what support you are looking for from us in the coming months? Please use our suggestion box to let us know what tools, information and resources you need. You can also email us at info@electionsos.org.
Election Relief
A little extra cheer to brighten up your Monday and post-holiday blues!
We're not crying, you're crying at this mom gifted her son an early Christmas gift.
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