Geoff Hing

After Congress failed to aid local election offices, a nonprofit provided critical funds — including $350 million from Mark Zuckerberg — that paid for staff, ballot-scanning machines, protective gear, and rental space that helped the presidential election run surprisingly smoothly.

The critical swing state that had a disastrous April primary endures a divisive election with long lines at the polls and battles in the courts — all amid a raging coronavirus outbreak. Yet voter turnout has been surging.

Election officials in cities across the country had ballots delayed or go missing in the mail.  

Large cities in key states — Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee — have sub-par delivery records; a former deputy postmaster general estimates tens of thousands of mailed ballots will be at risk for late delivery.

Voters there missed the fine print and the elections staff was overwhelmed. As November nears, a by-mail vote surge — due to virus safety — will spotlight the ballot counting in other presidential battleground states with slim voting margins.

An APM Reports analysis finds that public labs in at least 10 states -- the first line of defense in an outbreak -- endured budget troubles or staffing shortages in the past decade. The labs will be critical to conducting the increased testing needed to end social distancing.

APM Reports identified 294 people wrongly included on a list of voters on track to have their registrations canceled.

State officials claimed that people removed from the voter rolls for inactivity had likely died or moved away. But an APM Reports investigation found tens of thousands who hadn't — and still wanted to vote.

Voter registration deadlines have long been a part of American elections, but an APM Reports investigation finds that they disenfranchised a surprising number of voters in 2018.

Tasers have become an essential tool for police, but how effective are they? An APM Reports investigation finds that officers in some big cities rated Tasers as unreliable up to 40 percent of the time, and in three large departments, newer models were less effective than older ones. In 258 cases over three years, a Taser failed to subdue someone who was then shot and killed by police.

Data from three big police departments — and various statistical analyses — allowed us to compare newer and older models.

A handful of states, most of them led by Republicans, are using someone's decision not to vote as the trigger for removing them from the rolls. No state has been more aggressive with this approach than Georgia, where Brian Kemp, the secretary of state, oversaw the purging of a growing number of voters ahead of his own run for governor, according to an APM Reports investigation. Voting rights advocates call it a new form of voter suppression, and they fear it will soon spread to other states.