Many news organizations will make election integrity issues a central part of their coverage plans, especially given accusations by the U.S. government of Russian cyber espionage and Donald Trump’s evidence-less allegations of vote tampering and rigging. | AP Photo Media launches joint war-room to spot voting problems To covering 2016’s voting obstacles and hoaxes, press tries sharing tips, sources and data across typically competing newsrooms. 
 
 After spending 2016 trying to outmaneuver each other and deliver the next big break, hundreds of newsrooms are now engaged in unprecedented reporting partnerships to uncover barriers to voting and debunk fake news that can cause chaos and confusion on Election Day. 
 
 The biggest of the new alliances is Electionland, a project involving more than 400 newsrooms across the country casting aside competitiveness to share real-time data and tips on everything from reports about long lines and voter intimidation to hoax tweets suggesting stuffed ballot boxes. 
 
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 New York-based journalism non-profit ProPublica created the free service earlier this year by partnering up with national desks at USA Today and The New York Times, as well as scores of local news organizations including the Arizona Republic, Miami Herald and the Virginian-Pilot. Participating reporters and editors are all connected to an online smorgasbord of story leads and sources culled from social media, text messages and a national telephone helpline that the public is using to report voting problems. 
 
 “It’s an entire national newsroom, essentially only looking at problems facing people who vote,” said Jessica Huseman, a ProPublica senior reporting fellow. 
 
 While the Associated Press and CNN were among the major media outlets that declined invitations to join Electionland, it was a no-brainer for many local outlets crushed in recent years by layoffs and budget cuts. After all, what they’re getting is no-strings-attached data, technology and information that can go a long way to covering one of most challenging days of a journalist’s year. 
 
 “Any help a newsroom can get to sift through some of this stuff, to get to the more useful stuff, is absolutely valuable,” said Matt Dempsey, a Houston Chronicle data reporter leading his office’s coordination with Electionland. 
 
 Last week, Dempsey’s team published a front-page story based off multiple Electionland tips that led them to find poll workers in Harris County, Texas, giving voters incomplete instructions about photo identification. Other recent stories tied to Electionland’s analysis during the early voting period include Donald Trump supporters using a bullhorn outside the polls in West Palm Beach, Fla., and debunking a pair of internet hoaxes: one purporting to show video of Democrats stuffing ballot boxes and the other co-published with Univision that appears to show an immigration officer arresting someone waiting in line to vote. 
 
 Much of the dot-connecting is emanating from Electionland’s national desk based out of a pop-up newsroom at the City University of New York. There are also regional teams stationed at 14 journalism schools around the country, where students will be mining social media through keyword searches in multiple languages, looking out for local, regional and national trends about long lines, provisional ballot shortages, overly aggressive poll watchers and other forms of voter intimidation. Students have been trained to identify legitimate Twitter accounts, and they’re getting on-site help from professional reporters dispatched by ProPublica, the USA Today and The New York Times to package up relevant information for sharing – jump-ball style – to their media partners for follow-up reporting. 
 
 Electionland is also tapping into data generated by the national 866-OUR-VOTE telephone hotline that’s been taking calls on everything from malfunctioning election equipment to voter ID and intimidation problems. “They’re seeing the meat and potatoes of complaints,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has been running its phone-reporting program since 2002. 
 
 USA Today’s editors said in an interview that they expect Electionland will be a useful tool for their network of regional reporters at 25 sister newspapers across the country. They anticipate some of the leads will be false starts, and in some instances they’ll need to skip a tip because of staffing constraints, picking up on it later if it pans out through aggregation from other news sources. 
 
 But they said the project had plenty of relevance in a high-stakes election ripe with voting challenges, and where memories remain strong of the 2000 debacle when Florida’s hanging chads led to a prolonged legal dispute over recounts that lasted more than a month before George W. Bush was declared the president-elect. 
 
 “This is a really interesting experiment,” said Lee Horwich, managing editor for USA Today’s politics team. “I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. I don’t think any of us do. It seems like the right thing to do.” 
 
 The most useful stories of national interest will be highlighted on Electionland’s blog, and local partners are urged to tout their network on social media when they publish something inspired by a tip. Several of the members described the project as historic for the journalism industry given the collaboration across so many different newsrooms and despite the press’s inherent nature to fight over exclusives. 
 
 “The competitiveness of this is harder and harder to measure since everybody publishes everything they can confirm on Twitter, on Facebook, on whatever social platform you care to mention,” Horwich said. “The competitive advantage of being out 10 seconds, 3 minutes before others is not my top priority that day. My top priority is to get as complete a report and as accurate report as we possibly can.” 
 
 Journalists turning to a collaborative approach are doing so at the end of a 2016 presidential campaign unlike any other in modern times. Entire news organizations including the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and POLITICO have been banned at various times from attending Trump events, though those restrictions were later lifted. Crowds at the Republican’s rallies routinely boo and jeer at mainstream media outlets and the candidate’s traveling press corps. Fact checking has become a ubiquitous part of campaign coverage, while fake news articles maintain long shelf lives despite repeated attempts to debunk them and pledges by Facebook and Twitter to implement policies to address the issue. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in the media has hit its lowest level since Gallup polling on the topic started in 1972. 
 
 Against that backdrop, many news organizations will make election integrity issues a central part of their coverage plans, especially given accusations by the U.S. government of Russian cyber espionage and Trump’s evidence-less allegations of vote tampering and rigging. 
 
 At the networks, CBS has assigned its justice beat reporter to cover cyber and election hacking concerns on Election Day. Four NBC reporters will be on air covering voting irregularities, and it has a dedicated blog on the issue written by the author of a book on voter suppression. 
 
 “It’s going to be a shit show,” warned Brooke Binkowski, managing editor at Snopes, which is deploying about two dozen reporters and researchers for fact checking on internet hoaxes and other voting problems surrounding Election Day. 
 
 Another new startup aimed at helping the press and public to sift through the noise of Election Day is Votecastr, a partnership between data scientists, journalists and tech investors that plans to publish detailed projections Tuesday based off real-time turnout figures, combined with pre-polling surveys on voting preferences. The project will be pulling information from about 700 precincts in eight key battleground states -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania – and publishing on Slate. A live video steam of the analysis will be available on Vice Media. 
 
 Sasha Issenberg, one of the founding partners of the project, said the information can be useful to journalists looking for real-time evidence of polling problems. They would see signs if turnout levels are down at a precinct, which could suggest anything from broken voting machines to shortages on provisional ballots or intimidation. 
 
 “I hope that we are a generator of leads and hypotheses for reporters to chase,” he said. 
 
 While journalists may be encouraging the cross-newsroom partnerships and data and source sharing, they are also exposing themselves to heightened scrutiny from critics in Trump’s camp who may interpret their work as another example of the press trying to sabotage the Republican’s campaign. 
 
 “People will think even more what they always thought: the press is in collusion. We’re all one big group think. I think that can go either way depending on who you are talking to,” said Jane Elizabeth, a senior manager of the American Press Institute’s accountability journalism project. 
 
 “I’d hate to be in the middle of an election where this type of fact checking isn’t taking place,” she added. “You don’t know how much it’s going to help. But you don’t want to see the reverse side of that either.” ||||| California citizens vote early at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters on Nov. 4 in San Jose. | AP Photo Exit polls under siege The flow of Election Day information is about to change dramatically. 
 
 Ever since Jimmy Carter’s early concession in 1980 was blamed for losses to down-ballot Democrats in Western states, both politicians and media outlets have been religious about not reporting the results until everyone’s voted. 
 
 But that’s all about to change, starting early Tuesday morning. 
 
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 This year, a handful of different projects are underway to disrupt the rhythm and flow of information on Election Day — including one controversial effort that some worry could affect the actual election results. 
 
 Slate and Vice News have partnered with Votecastr, a company helmed by Obama and Bush campaign veterans, to provide real-time projections of how the candidates are faring in each state throughout the day. They expect to begin posting projections at 8 a.m. Eastern time on Election Day — a dramatic departure from current practice, where representatives from a consortium of news organizations (The Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News) huddle in a quarantine room without cell phones, poring over the earliest exit poll data but declining to release anything that points to an election result until all the polls have closed. 
 
 Journalist Sasha Issenberg — Votecastr’s chief strategist and author of “The Victory Lab,” a book that detailed the extensive voter-data operations in modern political campaigns — said the project, which seeks to replicate how campaigns model Election-Day turnout, will end the information blackout that exists between Monday afternoon, when the last polls are released, and Tuesday evening, when the first votes are tabulated. 
 
 “Much of the uncertainty in polling has to do with turnout,” said Issenberg, “and we're hoping to fill in the 24-hour void between the last pre-election poll analysis and the counting of the votes with data that can begin to answer the heretofore unanswerable question: who's actually voting?” 
 
 That gives some pause to Election-Day veterans, particularly those in the media, who worry that collecting and reporting this data while votes are being cast could impact the outcome. When the Votecastr project was announced back in September, ABC News decision desk consultant Ken Goldstein told the New York Times , “I’m profoundly uncomfortable with characterizing election results during Election Day.” 
 
 “Each of the six members of the [National Election Pool] have made a pledge before Congress not to make projections based on exit polling before all precincts in each state have closed,” said Joe Lenski, vice president at Edison Research, the firm that conducts the exit polls. 
 
 Issenberg rejects the premise that the Votecastr data — which will combine turnout levels at target precincts with pre-election polling data to model the results in each state — will affect the election results. 
 
 “It's not as though voters go to the polls without indications about the state of the horse race,” he said. “They've seen no shortage of polls, poll averages, poll aggregations, simulations and predictions before Election Day, and now see plenty of early-vote numbers being analyzed to determine who's winning and losing. Why should information on Election Day itself be held to a different standard than on the day before it? “ 
 
 For his part, Lenski agreed that the projections are unlikely to influence the outcome — whether it’s voters in a state staying home late in the day because projections show a decisive lead for one candidate, or voters in Western states not going to the polls after Eastern states are called. 
 
 “There are a lot of political people that try to make the case that early projections would decrease turnout,” Lenski said. “There’s never been any real signs or evidence that would be the case.” 
 
 Votecastr won’t be the only new data source for interested observers on Election Day itself. POLITICO is partnering with Morning Consult to conduct a survey of voters after they have cast ballots. 
 
 That project began two weeks ago, with interviews of early in-person and mail voters. But a large number of interviews will be conducted on Election Day itself. 
 
 Voters will complete the interviews over the internet, beginning one hour after the polls open in their state. Respondents will be asked whether they have voted, and how they voted: either using early voting, by mail or on Election Day in person. 
 
 POLITICO and Morning Consult will report on some of the results during the day — but, like with the traditional network exit polls, those reports won’t include anything that characterizes the outcome of the race. 
 
 “While we want our poll to provide a real-time look at how voters are feeling on Election Day, we will not be releasing any of our polling on how the candidates are performing prior to poll close on Election Day,” said Kyle Dropp, co-founder and chief research officer at Morning Consult. 
 
 The official network exit polls are continuing apace. Edison Research, the company that produces the exit polls for the consortium, will have 933 interviewers spread across the country at targeted polling places on Tuesday. Additionally, Edison Research began phone polling of early voters in late October to capture the nearly 40 percent of voters expected to cast their ballots before Election Day. 
 
 It’s a multimillion-dollar endeavor to build the infrastructure and process the interviews, which have two major uses: one on election night itself, and another for posterity. 
 
 “What they’re using it for is to guide their election-night broadcast,” said Lenski. “They’re looking at it to say which are the states that are going to be really close today? Which are the states that are going to be blowouts that we can call right at poll closing?” 
 
 The exit poll also exists as a record of who voted, and what they thought of the issues at play in the election. “It’s basically the biggest survey out there of actual voters,” Lenski said. 
 
 While the exit poll is weighted to the election results to make it more accurate, observers have pointed out imprecisions in some of its estimates over the long run. Those inconsistencies are minor, but combined with the high price tag, some news organizations are searching for other answers. 
 
 The Associated Press is commissioning two separate experiments on Election Day, according to David Pace, AP news editor for elections and special projects, from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. 
 
 “One is a national survey similar to the National Exit Poll; the other is a test of the feasibility of using the GPS capability of mobile phones to administer election surveys to voters shortly after they leave their Election Day or early voting polling place,” said Pace. 
 
 But, Pace said, the AP “will not be using the results from either experiment in our election coverage or race call decisions this year.” 
 
 The AP’s other polling partner, GfK Custom Research, has conducted polls of actual voters in recent elections that Pace described as “encouraging in our search for an accurate and cost-effective way to survey voters around Election Day.” 
 
 That’s also what Morning Consult is trying to accomplish, in partnership with POLITICO. 
 
 “Our exit poll questionnaire will be one of the most comprehensive surveys available on Election Day,” said Dropp, the Morning Consult pollster. “It contains dozens of questions on perceptions of the state of economy, reasoning for vote choice, and key candidate characteristics. We want to provide a complete view of how the electorate is feeling about their vote, the candidates, and the state of the country as they head to the polls.” 
 
 Voter estimates aren’t the only cause of disruption coming on Tuesday. Buzzfeed, between its online news site and live video presentation on Twitter, is trying to get ahead of the actual vote count the AP provides to the networks and other media outlets, including POLITICO. 
 
 BuzzFeed is partnering with Decision Desk HQ, which describes itself as “the only independent and comprehensive election night results service outside” of the AP. 
 
 BuzzFeed says it will report Decision Desk HQ’s calls, but also look for “a second trusted source” before declaring a state off the board. 
 
 BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith says he hopes the project provides “a clear window not just into who’s winning, but also how journalists and analysts are making these calls” — which could demystify the behind-the-scenes machinations of how Americans experience the vote count. ||||| We are still days away from finally knowing the winner of one of the ugliest elections in modern history, but we already have the biggest loser: the media. 
 
 From cable news employees sharing questions with Democrat Hillary Clinton in advance of TV town halls and debates, to executives making their airwaves endlessly available to Donald Trump for phone "interviews" that the Republican candidate controlled, the media have never performed less responsibly in a modern-era presidential election. 
 
 And that perception is not simply the result of WikiLeaks giving us an unvarnished, drip-drip-drip look at the incestuous groveling and information-sharing that reporters at some of the nation's top news outlets engaged in with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta the past 18 months. It's the result of my daily reporting on an industry that appears to have largely lost a clear sense of civic direction and purpose, while simultaneously becoming cozier with the powers that be and more dishonest with audiences. 
 
 It's a deadly combination that has dark consequences for democracy as the press fails in its primary job of giving citizens accurate, trustworthy information they can use in choosing who they want to lead the nation. Instead, as we have seen in two CNN events in March, candidate Clinton was secretly given information intended to skew the event and, therefore, the vote in her favor. That's the opposite of serving democracy — and it feeds Trump's dangerous rhetoric of the election being "rigged" against him. 
 
 The degree of confusion among media outlets as to how they should be covering Campaign 2016 has been staggering from day one. Nor is it limited to cable TV — not by a long shot. 
 
 Start with the Huffington Post deciding in July 2015 that Trump did not warrant political coverage. 
 
 "Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section," Ryan Grim, the website's Washington bureau chief, and Danny Shea, its editorial director, wrote. "Our reason is simple: Trump's campaign is a sideshow. We won't take the bait." 
 
 Skip ahead to June 2016 and Emmett Rensin, an editor at Vox, inciting his readers to violence should Trump appear in their cities. 
 
 "Advice: If Trump comes to your town, start a riot," Rensin wrote on Twitter. 
 
 "Let's be clear: It's never a shame to storm the barricades set up around a fascist," he wrote in another tweet. 
 
 And then in September, The New York Times decided it was going to use the word "liar" to describe Trump in news stories. 
 
 That might seem like small matter and a far more reasonable choice compared with an editor telling readers to start a riot. But it launched a torrent of words and all sorts of conflicting opinions on the use of that word because it involved the "paper of record" departing from a long-held norm associated with fairness in covering news. 
 
 "The challenge for the media is in defining what makes a lie," the Columbia Journalism Review wrote. "An expletive that used to be confined to op-eds, blogs and partisan screeds … is now being deployed in the world of straight-down-the-middle, 'mainstream' journalism." 
 
 So what about Hillary Clinton's claim that FBI Director James Comey said her statements on the emails were "truthful"? 
 
 The Washington Post gave her four Pinocchios for that. Should the Times now be calling her a "liar" as well? 
 
 Not that all the bad choices went against Trump. Besides unlimited cable TV time for the GOP candidate with show hosts largely letting him go unchecked, CNN hired Trump's former campaign director, Corey Lewandowski, as a featured analyst. And even as Lewandowski was being paid by CNN to essentially serve as a Trump surrogate, he was still on the candidate's payroll. 
 
 I thought CNN analyst Paul Begala, who serves as senior adviser to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA, defined conflict of interest. But the hiring of Lewandowski raised CNN's game to a new level in this realm of media muck. 
 
 How did so many in the media get to such questionable journalistic places during this tumultuous and troubling election? 
 
 One answer involves the widespread acceptance by many top media professionals of a highly questionable argument and conclusion about covering Trump. 
 
 The argument rests on the premise that Trump is a presidential candidate unlike any we have ever seen. 
 
 He's remarkable in some respects, no doubt about that. I wrote several times during this election cycle about Trump being a watershed media candidate — better in his use of media than even Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy. 
 
 I based that claim on this 70-year-old businessman finding a sweet spot in this time of media transition that combined skilled use of free TV with the creation of a credible voice in social media. Win or lose Tuesday night, Trump has rewritten the book on media use in primaries, during which he spent almost nothing and vanquished more than a dozen opponents through the mix of free TV and social media platforms with 23 million followers. 
 
 But many took the exceptionalism premise as fact and then argued that since he is a candidate without precedent, we must find new ways to cover him. Old rules no longer apply. 
 
 Once you accepted the need for new ways to cover Trump and bought into the logic of abandoning legacy standards, anything was possible — from calling him a liar on the front page of The New York Times to telling readers it's never a shame to storm the barricades set up around a fascist. 
 
 Make no mistake: Trump is a vile character. The claims of sexual assault he made in the "Access Hollywood" video are dangerous and disgusting — and they are just one of many things he's said that warrant those adjectives, particularly when it comes to women. 
 
 But George Wallace, who ran in the 1964, '72 and '76 primaries as a Democrat and in the 1968 general election as the candidate of the American Independent Party, was also a vile character. As governor, he stood in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to protest integration. In his inaugural speech as governor, he vowed "segregation forever." 
 
 And is Trump a bigger liar and more dangerous to democracy than Richard Nixon? Has he committed the crimes Nixon did with the full powers of the presidency?
– If misery and politics make strange bedfellows, their Election 2016 love child in the Fourth Estate is a nascent project called Electionland. As Politico reports, major media outlets are abandoning the time-honored practice of scooping each other in order to combine reporting forces in the name of making sure Election Day is as clean as possible. "It’s an entire national newsroom, essentially only looking at problems facing people who vote," says a senior reporting fellow at ProPublica, the nonprofit which gave birth to Electionland earlier this year and was quickly joined by the likes of the New York Times, USA Today, and Google News Lab, as well as scores of more regional media outlets like the Arizona Republic, Miami Herald, and the Virginian-Pilot. Notable among those who declined to partner up: CNN and the Associated Press. Yet it's what Quartz calls "an unprecedented gathering of journalists," and includes newsrooms set up at City University of New York and at 13 journalism schools. On Tuesday, Electionland will watch social media, Google search trends, and data from the Election Protection project, as well as receive reports from reporters on the ground. "This is a really interesting experiment," says a politics editor at USA Today. "I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work. I don’t think any of us do. It seems like the right thing to do." Adds Snopes' managing editor: "It's going to be a sh-- show."