News21 Student Journalists Discuss Voting Rights at New America Foundation Event

Student journalists from the national Carnegie-Knight News21 program will participate in a panel discussion about voting rights Tuesday at the Washington, D.C.-based New America Foundation.

“Who Can Vote? And How Will They Be Informed?” is part of New America’s “Delve into ‘12” series exploring the 2012 elections. The event, which will take place from 12:15-1:45 p.m. EDT, also will be available via live webcast at http://newamerica.net/events/2012/who_can_vote.

News21, headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, is a national investigative reporting initiative funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

This summer, News21 student journalists produced “Who Can Vote?,” a major national investigation into voting rights in the U.S. that was published in major media outlets such as The Washington Post, nbcnews.com, National Public Radio, the Center for Public Integrity and the Philadelphia Inquirer. As part of the project, the students gathered, organized and analyzed all reported cases of election fraud in the U.S. since 2000 to build the most comprehensive database of its kind.

During the first part of the event, News21 Fellows and Cronkite students Maryann Batlle and Joe Henke will discuss the findings of the investigation and how they relate to legislative efforts to tighten voter ID requirements in order to prevent fraud. The discussion will be moderated by Leonard Downie Jr., the Cronkite School’s Weil Family Professor of Journalism and former executive editor of The Washington Post, who helped oversee the voting rights investigation.

The second part of the event will focus on the latest innovations in online voter information. Roger MacDonald, leader of the Internet Archive TV News Research Service Project, and Anthea Watson Strong, an independent consultant with the Google politics and elections team, will participate in a discussion moderated by Tom Glaisyer, a former New America Foundation Media Policy Fellow.