Knight Election Hub

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7 resources

5 Weeks to Go! Coverage Roadmap for Election Reporters

A journalist roadmap for where to focus your election reporting in October.

Get 1:1 help making your election plans and finding Election Hub resources

Not sure where to start? Join Ariel Zirulnick’s office hours. She can help you think through your election plan and navigate the resources available here in the Knight Election Hub.

OpenNews Communities of Practice Calls

This rotating call touches on different aspects of election reporting, like community and audience engagement, voter guides and products, or election data and visualizations, with a focus on discussion, ideation and exploration of both big-picture questions and practical solutions to common problems.

Votebeat Beat Backgrounders

Everything you need to know to cover voting in 2024, in 30 minute doses. These courses will familiarize reporters with the basics, and provide additional materials to help them dive deeper into individual topics.

Media Guide on Covering Elections and Voting

This comprehensive guide will help you understand variability in election laws and practices, and learn how to better navigate misinformation, legal changes, and the logistical aspects of election coverage.

Elections Campaign Toolkit

Access customizable fundraising newsletters, social media copy, toppers, graphics, and more — making it easy for you and your audience to support your election coverage.

Election SOS weekly newsletter

Stay up-to-date throughout the 2024 election cycle with the latest information from Election SOS to bolster your coverage.

Most popular

5 resources

Swing State Data Training

Get hands-on experience with powerful tools to research donors, lobbyists, dark money, and more.

Sunlight Search Training and Research

Learn how to deeply profile candidates for public office.

Elections Campaign Toolkit

Access customizable fundraising newsletters, social media copy, toppers, graphics, and more — making it easy for you and your audience to support your election coverage.

Govpack

Use this Wordpress plugin to create dynamic candidate profiles for voter guides and other civic journalism.

Nota AI tools for newsrooms

Use this suite of AI tools to enhance different aspects of your newsroom's work, from summarizing lengthy articles, to streamlining newsletter and social-media creation, to helping you create visual and video coverage of election news.

What's new

Check out these resources, freshly-added to the Knight Election Hub.

7 resources

Voter Explorer Pa.

Voter Explorer Pa., provided by The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a collection of story guides and a regularly updated database of Pennsylvania registered voters. Journalists can select voter data, filtering by age, gender, party, address, voter history, or other fields, then download the data for further analysis. Voter Explorer Pa. will help reporters quickly find local contacts for election stories; the how-to guides walk reporters through different kinds of stories that can be informed by the data.

Votebeat Expert Desk

Get quick-turnaround answers from election experts — former officials, tech experts, election law scholars — in a Slack channel starting October 14, moderated by Votebeat editorial director Jessica Huseman.

PEN America Digital Safety & Online Abuse Prevention Workshops

Learn how to protect yourself, your colleagues, and your employees from online abuse while covering election-related stories with one of these four workshops.

Legitimate's AI Tool Suite (in English and Spanish)

Use this suite of AI tools for everything from background research to optimization and reader engagement. These tools (available in both English and Spanish) streamline the writing process, enhancing a newsroom's ability to deliver accurate, engaging content around the election for readers.

Sunlight Search research desk

Enlist the pros to help your newsroom conduct deep background research on political candidates. Sunlight Search will pull documents, analyze data, and produce a timeline and source list on up to three candidates that will help your reporters put together impactful stories before the election.

Trusting News webinar series: 5 strategies for useful, trusted election coverage

Join any of these October webinars to learn tangible strategies for topics from creating coverage that reaches beyond political junkies to covering hot button issues in a way that feels credible across the complicated spectrum of viewpoints.

Information Futures Lab Election Crisis Workshop

Join an online, immersive training event that places journalists and community leaders at the center of a fast-moving, breaking election story, challenging them to make strategic reporting decisions in real time.

Create voter guides

From creating the guide to marketing it, here are some key resources. Click the category to view the full list of resources.

10 resources

Ballotpedia: Candidate and ballot measure data

Ballotpedia will provide access to structured data about elections, candidates, and ballot measures in the state(s) your newsroom covers.

ElectUp election guides

ElectUp is a platform for creating election guides that automatically gathers, organizes, and presents candidate comparisons. Because it was developed in local newsrooms, it fits smoothly into editorial workflows and has been refined to resonate with audience needs. NOTE: Space is limited, priority deadline is early September. Sign up now!

Guide to Voter Guides

News Revenue Hub's downloadable guide walks newsrooms through the planning and audience research necessary to create a strong voter guide that's optimized to reach as many people as possible.

Govpack

Use this Wordpress plugin to create dynamic candidate profiles for voter guides and other civic journalism.

Guides.vote nonpartisan voter guides

Get nonpartisan voter guides, created by veteran journalists and drawing on multiple sources, in both English and Spanish for 70 key elections nationwide, from the presidential race on down.

Center for Tech and Civic Life: Ballot Information Project

This nationwide dataset sourced from election officials, available through CTCL's API as well as Google's Civic Information API, includes federal, state and local candidates, as well as their party affiliation, the office they're seeking, contact information, websites and social media handles.

Voter Guide Training

This five-day email course walks journalists through how to build a voter guide, including user experience and designing an accountability roadmap.

League of Women Voters: Vote 411

This site provides a way for voters in all 50 states to register to vote or check their registration. Vote 411 also has sample ballots and sometimes candidate questionnaires for state and local races.

Election SOS: Make Your Voter Guide ICONIC

This guide from Election SOS makes the case for incorporating easy-to-understand icons in voter guides, and includes best practices and resources for doing so.

The Journalist's Resource: How to create a judicial voter guide

People want more information about the judges on their ballot, and this guide produced by the Journalist's Resource and America Amplified lays out eight steps newsrooms can take to create local and state judicial election guides for their audience.

Plan election coverage

How will your newsroom cover the lead-up to November 5, the day itself, and the post-election period? Here are some tools that can help your planning.

5 resources

MuckRock expert consulting on FOIA or document-display projects

Get custom training and coaching from MuckRock on an intensive public records project or a strategy for large-scale document display. Potential projects could involve many aspects of election coverage: voting machine security, gauging impacts of disinformation, cybersecurity intrusions and responses, threats and violence in the run up to voting day.

Election SOS Key Dates & Trainings Calendar

This Google Calendar maintained by Election SOS provides key dates in the election cycle alongside free training for journalists on a variety of topics. Click the link to subscribe.

Votebeat Expert Desk

Get quick-turnaround answers from election experts — former officials, tech experts, election law scholars — in a Slack channel starting October 14, moderated by Votebeat editorial director Jessica Huseman.

Election SOS weekly newsletter

Stay up-to-date throughout the 2024 election cycle with the latest information from Election SOS to bolster your coverage.

Trusting News webinar series: 5 strategies for useful, trusted election coverage

Join any of these October webinars to learn tangible strategies for topics from creating coverage that reaches beyond political junkies to covering hot button issues in a way that feels credible across the complicated spectrum of viewpoints.

Background candidates

Who's running for elected office in your community? These trainings and tools will help you create deep profiles of candidates for your audience.

5 resources

Junkipedia: Cross-platform social media monitoring

Junkipedia helps reporters quickly search and investigate what politicians are saying online, across a range of mainstream and fringe social media sites.

Sunlight Search Training and Research

Learn how to deeply profile candidates for public office.

VisualPing Website Monitoring and Change Detection

Use this free tool to track updates on government election websites, monitor candidate websites and news, and keep an eye on specific topics of interest without manually checking each page repeatedly.

MuckRock expert consulting on FOIA or document-display projects

Get custom training and coaching from MuckRock on an intensive public records project or a strategy for large-scale document display. Potential projects could involve many aspects of election coverage: voting machine security, gauging impacts of disinformation, cybersecurity intrusions and responses, threats and violence in the run up to voting day.

Sunlight Search research desk

Enlist the pros to help your newsroom conduct deep background research on political candidates. Sunlight Search will pull documents, analyze data, and produce a timeline and source list on up to three candidates that will help your reporters put together impactful stories before the election.

Get data

Access these treasure troves of data for everything from candidates information, financing, voting patterns and election machinery. Click the category to view the full list of resources.

10 resources

Swing State Data Training

Get hands-on experience with powerful tools to research donors, lobbyists, dark money, and more.

Google: Civic Information API

Google's Civic Information API pulls in data from a number of partners to provide election information for voters.

Voter Explorer Pa.

Voter Explorer Pa., provided by The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a collection of story guides and a regularly updated database of Pennsylvania registered voters. Journalists can select voter data, filtering by age, gender, party, address, voter history, or other fields, then download the data for further analysis. Voter Explorer Pa. will help reporters quickly find local contacts for election stories; the how-to guides walk reporters through different kinds of stories that can be informed by the data.

The University of Florida's Election Lab: Voter Turnout Data

The lab's massive database on voter turnout goes from 1789 to the present, and lets users examine voter turnout demographics, as well as for specific selected recent elections.

Verified Voting: The Verifier

Dig in to individual county data to see the technology officials are using to count ballots. Journalists can then read more about the technology (including how it works, where else it's used and how accessible it is) and see the individual manufacturer.

The University of Florida's Election Lab: Precinct Data

The lab's Voting and Election Science Team produces interactive maps based on individual precinct-level data for recent U.S. elections.

Center for Tech and Civic Life: Ballot Information Project

This nationwide dataset sourced from election officials, available through CTCL's API as well as Google's Civic Information API, includes federal, state and local candidates, as well as their party affiliation, the office they're seeking, contact information, websites and social media handles.

MIT's Election Data and Sciences Lab: Data

This collection of 27 datasets has county and precinct-level data for U.S. House, Senate and Presidential elections from 1976-2022.

Redistricting Data Hub

This data repository funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Fair Representation in Redistricting Initiative has more than 12,000 datasets from all 50 states to aid users in understanding and participating in the redistricting process.

Ballotpedia: Candidate and ballot measure data

Ballotpedia will provide access to structured data about elections, candidates, and ballot measures in the state(s) your newsroom covers.

Publish election results

These resources make it easy to bring results to your audience in real-time.

3 resources

Free AP Election Data for INN members

With support from the Google News Initiative, The Associated Press is giving INN members access to U.S. election results as part of the organizations’ shared commitment to providing facts around the democratic process.

Decision Desk HQ Live Election Results

Decision Desk HQ provides embeddable web widgets that display live results across all types of elections, from the presidential race to town boards and other local offices.

Free AP Election data, content & services for qualifying swing state newsrooms

INN or LION members in swing states can get AP's U.S. election results and content for free, as part of the organizations’ shared commitment to providing facts around the democratic process.

Get voter insights

What matters to your community? Check out these polls and strategies for deeper, community-driven election coverage.

6 resources

The Citizens Agenda

The Citizens Agenda is an alternative to horse race coverage that research shows increases trust from the audience. This 44-page guide outlines ways newsrooms can put people — rather than politicians — first in their election coverage.

CHIP50: Trust in Institutions Tracker

This database tracks citizens' trust in key institutions like branches of government, police, hospitals and news media. Journalists can explore the differences between Democrat, Republican and Independent sentiments.

CHIP50: Views on Abortion Tracker

This data, collected from a survey conducted around the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, shows public opinion on abortion-related scenarios. It includes state-level data on the importance of abortion issues for voters.

MassINC Polling state-level political and issues polling

Public opinion experts will conduct state-level political and issues polls, determining survey topics in collaboration with participating newsrooms.

CHIP50: Local and state-level surveys

This 50-state survey led by Northeastern University and supported by the National Science Foundation will work directly with a group of newsrooms to conduct two surveys during the summer/fall of 2024, asking policy questions relevant to all voters as well as questions relevant at the state level. Reports will summarize our survey findings, providing information about the issues important to local audiences, and putting those local numbers into a national context.

Voter Explorer Pa.

Voter Explorer Pa., provided by The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a collection of story guides and a regularly updated database of Pennsylvania registered voters. Journalists can select voter data, filtering by age, gender, party, address, voter history, or other fields, then download the data for further analysis. Voter Explorer Pa. will help reporters quickly find local contacts for election stories; the how-to guides walk reporters through different kinds of stories that can be informed by the data.

Get training

These webinars and email courses will each help you tackle a different aspect of your newsroom's election coverage. Click the category for a full list of resources.

9 resources

Votebeat Beat Backgrounders

Everything you need to know to cover voting in 2024, in 30 minute doses. These courses will familiarize reporters with the basics, and provide additional materials to help them dive deeper into individual topics.

Trusting News webinar series: 5 strategies for useful, trusted election coverage

Join any of these October webinars to learn tangible strategies for topics from creating coverage that reaches beyond political junkies to covering hot button issues in a way that feels credible across the complicated spectrum of viewpoints.

Information Futures Lab Election Crisis Workshop

Join an online, immersive training event that places journalists and community leaders at the center of a fast-moving, breaking election story, challenging them to make strategic reporting decisions in real time.

American Press Institute: Civic Discourse and Democracy Program

API offers frequent webinars and local news summits for journalists. In 2024, they're partnering with the Associated Press to offer free monthly virtual trainings on various aspects of democracy and election coverage; planned topics include community engagement around elections, mental health and election coverage and how to retain the audiences newsrooms gain from election-related traffic bumps.

Voter Guide Training

This five-day email course walks journalists through how to build a voter guide, including user experience and designing an accountability roadmap.

Swing State Data Training

Get hands-on experience with powerful tools to research donors, lobbyists, dark money, and more.

Election SOS Key Dates & Trainings Calendar

This Google Calendar maintained by Election SOS provides key dates in the election cycle alongside free training for journalists on a variety of topics. Click the link to subscribe.

Sunlight Search Training and Research

Learn how to deeply profile candidates for public office.

Election SOS 2024 Trainings

Election SOS has a full slate of trainings from now until Election Day 2024, aimed at helping journalists reach new communities with their election coverage, create coverage plans and debunk mis and disinformation.

Cover misinformation

These tools will help you determine fact from fiction and track the sources of election-related dis- and mis-information in your community.

7 resources

Information Futures Lab Election Crisis Workshop

Join an online, immersive training event that places journalists and community leaders at the center of a fast-moving, breaking election story, challenging them to make strategic reporting decisions in real time.

Authoritarian Influence Tracker

This searchable database lets users sort through Russian and Chinese governments' efforts to undermine democracy around the world.

The Poynter Institute: Politifact

This site fact checks statements from politicians and media personalities, as well as claims making the rounds on social media sites. They're also tracking the promises both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have made on the campaign trail as they run for president.

Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard

This dashboard tracking narratives from Russian, Chinese and Iranian government officials and state-funded media can help journalists better determine which messaging is being pushed by government, rather than independent, channels.

Junkipedia: Cross-platform social media monitoring

Junkipedia helps reporters quickly search and investigate what politicians are saying online, across a range of mainstream and fringe social media sites.

AI Incident Database

This site catalogs the instances — including election-related instances — where AI has been used to manipulate reality.

Center for an Informed Public: Expert sources

Get expert help for misinformation-related reporting, including quotes from academic experts, historical context around election rumors, information about a specific rumor, data access and/or data visualization tools.

Talk to experts

These resources will connect you directly with people who can answer your election-related questions.

7 resources

Women Also Know Stuff: Political science experts

This large database of political science scholars who identify as women allows reporters to search by key words and view experts' contact information and research specialties.

Votebeat Expert Desk

Get quick-turnaround answers from election experts — former officials, tech experts, election law scholars — in a Slack channel starting October 14, moderated by Votebeat editorial director Jessica Huseman.

Trusted Elections Expert Database

This database from Election SOS and the American Press Institute lets journalists search for trustworthy elections experts by area of expertise, geographic state or native language.

Committee for Safe and Secure Elections

This group brings together election and law enforcement officials, offering resources for both to improve the safety and security of elections. For many states, they offer pocket guides to state statutes that pertain to election threats and interference; they also offer policy solutions and experts that can speak to election security solutions.

MIT's Election Data and Sciences Lab: Experts

MIT's Election Data and Sciences Lab maintains a list of 30+ experts in various election-related topics from all over the country.

Center for an Informed Public: Expert sources

Get expert help for misinformation-related reporting, including quotes from academic experts, historical context around election rumors, information about a specific rumor, data access and/or data visualization tools.

Sunlight Search research desk

Enlist the pros to help your newsroom conduct deep background research on political candidates. Sunlight Search will pull documents, analyze data, and produce a timeline and source list on up to three candidates that will help your reporters put together impactful stories before the election.

Cover election administration

How are your local and state elections run? These resources will help with coverage of this important topic. Click the category to view the full list of resources.

9 resources

Verified Voting: The Verifier

Dig in to individual county data to see the technology officials are using to count ballots. Journalists can then read more about the technology (including how it works, where else it's used and how accessible it is) and see the individual manufacturer.

Bipartisan Policy Center

This nonprofit center convenes both Republicans and Democrats to find solutions to complicated issues; one of those issues is election administration, and their work focuses on recommending solutions to the challenges officials and poll workers across the country face in holding fair, secure and accessible elections.

Elections Performance Index

This tool uses factors like voting wait time, the percentage of rejected ballots and the percentage of unreturned mail ballots to evaluate state election administrators' performance, giving officials, journalists and the public ways to track the efficacy of changes to how elections are run.

National Conference of State Legislatures: Election Resources

NCSL has a comprehensive list of state laws that affect elections — from how various states handle felon voting rights to poll watching to voter ID laws.

Center for Election Innovation & Research

This nonprofit works with election administrators around the country to help improve elections and increase voter trust in the process. When applicable, their research is broken down by individual states, making it easier for journalists to parse the relevant information for their communities.

Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) Comprehensive Report

The data analysis produced by this federal agency lets users search any state, territory or county for election and voting data, such as the percentage of ballots returned via drop box or the percentage of people who registered to vote in-person.

Election Integrity Scorecard

The scorecard grades and ranks states based on the election security laws that the conservative think tank recommends.

State Voting Rights Tracker

This tracker lets users search for individual bills and laws by state or issue, and offers analysis of the measure's potential impact. Great for looking at common trends in election-related legislation.

Voter registration list maintenance

This site from the National Conference of State Legislatures lays out how states can "clean" their voter rolls around the country.

Protect yourself

3 resources

Coalition Against Online Violence: Resources for Journalists

This resource from the International Women's Media Foundation and the International Center for Journalists lays out what journalists need to to to protect themselves in various scenarios, including if they've been doxxed, are in the middle of an online attack or just want to prepare for the possibility of online abuse.

PEN America Digital Safety & Online Abuse Prevention Workshops

Learn how to protect yourself, your colleagues, and your employees from online abuse while covering election-related stories with one of these four workshops.

Extremism Coverage Prep

This training from Hearken's Election SOS — available for free once participants are vetted — includes videos and other resources to help journalists and their newsrooms develop appropriate editorial policies and stay safe when covering extremism.

Cover voting rights/legal issues

7 resources

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: Election Legal Guide

This organization supports reporters around the country, protecting their legal rights. One of their initiatives is an extensive Election Legal Guide, outlining journalists' rights while covering campaign events and reporting around polling places. There is more in-depth information for a handful of battleground states, and the guide is available in both English and Spanish.

Democracy Docket: Court Case Database

This online site founded by Democratic attorney Marc Elias includes a searchable database of decided and pending court cases shaping voting rights around the country.

National Conference of State Legislatures: Election Resources

NCSL has a comprehensive list of state laws that affect elections — from how various states handle felon voting rights to poll watching to voter ID laws.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections

This group formed by former Republican officials funds election legal challenges that they view as undermining democracy. They argue for election rules established by lawmakers — not the courts — and the enforcement of election laws.

State Voting Rights Tracker

This tracker lets users search for individual bills and laws by state or issue, and offers analysis of the measure's potential impact. Great for looking at common trends in election-related legislation.

Media Guide on Covering Elections and Voting

This comprehensive guide will help you understand variability in election laws and practices, and learn how to better navigate misinformation, legal changes, and the logistical aspects of election coverage.

Protect the Vote: Legal Activity

This site run by the Republican National Committee tracks legal challenges to election laws that involve the RNC and Republican groups across the country.

Cover political violence

6 resources

Princeton's Bridging Divides Initiative: Geographies of Risk and Resilience

Use these interactive mapping tools to identify emerging hotspots for political violence risk and connect with community groups working to counter these threats around the country.

U.S. Department of Justice: Election Threats

This site from the DOJ collects federal guidance about how to respond to threats against election workers, and includes a list of enforcement actions involving threats to elections.

Princeton's Bridging Divides Initiative: Understanding Threats and Harassment Against Local Officials

This research project tracks the threats local officials face in their communities through surveys, in-depth interviews and event data, all made available for public use.

Extremism Coverage Prep

This training from Hearken's Election SOS — available for free once participants are vetted — includes videos and other resources to help journalists and their newsrooms develop appropriate editorial policies and stay safe when covering extremism.

Election SOS Newsroom Help Desk: Navigating election coverage after Trump rally shooting

This post from Election SOS rounds up key resources for newsrooms covering political violence, compiled immediately after the June assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Princeton's Bridging Divides Initiative: De-escalation Resources

This interactive tool connects users with a network of de-escalation, community safety, and bystander training practitioners and resources from all around the country.