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Trump Has Tried to Exert More Control Over Elections. Here Are the Key Findings From Our Reporting.

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Early voting for the midterm elections in Los Angeles this month Grace Hie Yoon/Anadolu via Getty Images Ahead of next week’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished institutional guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 presidential election, ProPublica’s reporting has shown. Trump has empowered his loyalists to try to transform the voting process. He launched an unprecedented — and largely unsuccessful — effort to find noncitizen voters . And he tried to restrict mail-in voting . Our reporters have spent much of this year covering Trump’s efforts to exert more federal control over elections. Here are five takeaways from their reporting. 1. The Trump administration has sought greater federal control over elections. In April, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield reported on Trump’s efforts to “ take over ” the midterm elections, detailing how the administration has discarded or diminished endeavors across the federal go...
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How a Secret Vote by U.N. Scientists Legitimized Carbon Capture and Skewed Decades of Climate Policy

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Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica From the series Carbon Captured: How the fossil fuel industry influence climate research , an investigation from ProPublica and Drilled In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.  To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work. Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it the...
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Federal and State Officials Ramp Up Scrutiny of DraftKings, Other Sports Betting Apps

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Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, one of three federal lawmakers who recently cited ProPublica reporting in a letter asking sports betting companies for more information about their business practices. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images State and federal officials have ramped up scrutiny of online sports betting companies in recent weeks, launching inquiries, demanding information and, in one case, proposing a new rule that would limit when companies like DraftKings can pitch their users to bet more. The moves — by gaming regulators, government lawyers and federal lawmakers — follow an investigation last month by ProPublica that tested the guardrails DraftKings and other sports betting companies have in place to protect users from spiraling out of control. That system is called responsible gaming, and executives say it’s integral to their companies’ long-term success. The ProPublica article showed how DraftKings bestowed VIP status on a reporter who delib...
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