🇺🇲 United States election 2016

Electionland was a collaborative journalism project spearheaded by ProPublica and Google News Lab that tracked and covered voting during the 2016 United States presidential election, across the country and in real time. Electionland employed technology and data to track problems at the polls.

It was both the largest single-day collaborative journalism project in history and the largest real-time, comprehensive look at voting issues in U.S. history. Electionland brought together dozens of media organizations, technology companies, and journalism schools,  marrying the best of traditional journalistic acumen with new data, tools, and technologies. 

For the Electionland project, Meedan’s Check platform was used to manage voting problem reports. All social media reports deemed worthy of investigation were added to state-level projects on Check, where the assigned teams would work to verify and contextualize the reports. Some reports from other channels (SMS, direct messages on Twitter, WhatsApp) were also added to Check for further investigation and verification. 

Check statuses allowed any team member to see the status of a given report, and allowed media partners to view only the verified or debunked reports for their state. A Slack-based ‘Checkbot’ was written to message any report changes to state-level channels on Slack.