for an AP survey of all 50 states that revealed that very few state systems had an election security review from the Department of Homeland Security, even though many have asked for it amid concerns about Russian meddling in this year’s election. http://bit.ly/2rmi8b4
When tornadoes tore through Middle Tennessee in the early-morning hours of Super Tuesday, AP’s staff deftly pivoted from preparing for the state’s primary to covering a natural disaster.
From first light on Tuesday and throughout the day, Nashville and Memphis staffers delivered compelling all-formats coverage of the devastation that left at least 24 dead statewide. The team also connected the disaster to the primary, monitoring the impact on voting.
Strong aftermath coverage followed, including a presidential visit on Friday and well-received pieces on recovery efforts and a worship service at a damaged church. With out-of-state staffers and the entire South Desk contributing to the coverage, the sustained effort showed the AP at its best.
For proving nimble, responsive and collaborative coverage on a major breaking news story under chaotic conditions, the multiformat Tennessee team of Travis Loller, Kristin Hall, Kimberlee Kruesi, Mark Humphrey, Jonathan Mattise, Adrian Sainz and Teresa Walker shares this week’s Best of the States award.
Oklahomans widely assumed that 12 Republican state lawmakers who lost their bids for re-election came up short at the polls because of their opposition to raising pay for the state’s public school teachers.
While opposition to education funding may have been one factor in incumbent losses in the GOP primaries, Oklahoma City-based reporter Sean Murphy began hearing scuttlebutt about an organized effort from within the Republican Party to kick out incumbents from their own party.
Using campaign finance reports and solid sourcing at the Capitol, Murphy was alone in showing that the rumors were true.
Public records showed a top state House GOP leader had given money to opponents of two of his own colleagues, and the opponents unseated the incumbents. Murphy also leveraged a relationship developed over years of reporting to get the lawmaker to talk. He acknowledged a plan to punish fellow Republicans for taking hardline stances that forced a compromise with Democrats on a plan to raise taxes to pay for teacher raises.
For combining shoe-leather reporting with smart document work, Murphy wins this week’s Best of the States award.
analyzed voter turnout and ballot rejection data, finding that the number of absentee ballot rejections is likely to soar in key presidential battleground states this fall – enough that it could tip the balance in a close race. They also found the problem is more pronounced in some urban areas where Democratic votes are concentrated and rejections trended higher during this year’s primaries.
Cassidy and Bajak looked at how many people voted by mail in this year’s post-Covid primaries, the percentage of those ballots that were rejected and the state’s turnout during the 2016 presidential election to project how many absentee ballots could get rejected in the coming election if those numbers remained stable. Their analysis found between 185,000 and 292,000 voters in the seven key states they examined could be disenfranchised. https://bit.ly/3hfnXyP
relied on voting data available to the AP to demonstrate how some Democrats were voting in Republican primaries in an effort to block candidates backed by former President Donald Trump.National political reporter Peoples and data journalist Kessler had found that an unusually high number of people who voted in Georgia’s 2020 Democratic primary cast ballots in this year’s GOP primary. The pair learned that some Democrats were so worried an election denier backed by Trump could become secretary of state and ultimately run Georgia’s elections, they decided to cross party lines in the primary to support incumbent Brad Raffensperger, who famously resisted Trump’s pressure to overturn the 2020 election results.The result is a perfect blend of traditional political reporting and data analysis that tells a broader story about unusual decisions voters are making in an effort to protect democracy in the U.S.Read more
It was among the most puzzling moments of the first Republican presidential debate: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis refused to answer a question about supporting a national abortion ban and instead offered a story about a woman he met who had survived “multiple abortion attempts” and was saved after being “discarded in a pan.” The tale was clearly meant to curry favor with the conservative voters who decide GOP primaries, but was it true?
Dogged reporting over several days by a team of three reporters — democracy team misinformation reporters Ali Swenson and Christine Fernando, and Miami-based national political reporter Adriana Gomez Licon — found that the woman did exist but that her birth story was far more complicated than the version described by DeSantis. While other outlets also pursued DeSantis’ story, the AP team had several significant firsts: They were was the first to interview the woman and get her story first hand; the first to surface newspaper stories from the 1950s that offered a much different version of events; and the first to get historical photos from the time she was born, including one showing her as a baby being discharged from the hospital. These allowed AP to distinguish its coverage of a nationally significant moment in the GOP presidential primary.
Swenson quickly found a few old news articles about the woman and two YouTube videos that featured her telling her story for anti-abortion advocacy groups and looped in Gomez Licon, who had spent years covering DeSantis in Florida, and Fernando, who had covered the national abortion debate extensively in her previous job.
It was Fernando who reached the woman, Miriam “Penny” Hopper, and persuaded her to talk to the AP. Gomez Licon meanwhile worked with news researcher Rhonda Shafner and local libraries in central Florida to surface newspaper clippings from 1956 about the medical effort to save the baby.
For scoring significant firsts on a story that widely resonated, Swenson, Fernando and Gomez Licon win this week’s first citation for Best of the Week.
