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We Can’t Predict What Will Happen on Election Day. But We’ll Be Here to Cover It.

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Early voting for the midterms in New York last month Ryan Murphy/AFP via Getty Images This has been a midterm election cycle unlike any other. Wealthy donors spent staggering sums . Both parties moved to redraw congressional district lines . President Donald Trump and his allies relentlessly questioned whether the results could be trusted even before a single ballot was counted. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit that said the federal government would contest any outcome in which Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent in Alaska, was not victorious. Newsrooms, including ours, have tried to plan how we will cover an election in which the losing side refuses to accept the will of the voters. Was the Alaska lawsuit a single data point or a harbinger? As we prepare to write about Nov. 3 and beyond, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to game out what might happen in the future — not our strong suit. The record shows that ...
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I Was There to Document the Aftermath of Deadly Flooding. Then, It Started Raining.

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A flash flood along the Rio Ruidoso on July 30, 2025 Three summers ago, over Father’s Day weekend, my family and I went camping in the Lincoln National Forest, just a few hours drive north of our home in El Paso, Texas. It’s a beautiful area that’s long served as a getaway for the region, with skiing in the winter, and golf and hiking in the summer. My daughter played under the trees, and I rode my bike down mountain trails that, I noticed, seemed concerningly dry.  The next evening, after we left to drive home, two fires started in forests surrounding the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, around 25 miles away from where we’d been. I watched horrifying videos online of fire lapping the mountains behind the village’s strip malls and parking lots. The fires were eventually suppressed by a combination of human effort and the late summer monsoon season. But when the downpour of rain hit the burnt landscape around Ruidoso, it created another problem: Recurring floods then ripped t...
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After ProPublica Investigation, House Democrats Demand Answers on U.S. Citizens Detained by Immigration Agents

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Photo illustration by ProPublica. Source images: Congress and videos obtained by ProPublica. What Happened: Citing ProPublica’s recent investigation , House Democrats are again asking the Trump administration to explain why hundreds of U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents and how the government verifies citizenship during immigration operations. In an October letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, California Rep. Lou Correa and 39 other legislators demanded the administration share the number of citizens that immigration agents have detained and how the government is tracking such encounters. They also asked for more information about how agents are trained to verify citizenship and legal status. Why It Matters: ProPublica counted more than 500 Americans detained by immigration agents — almost certainly an undercount since the government is not transparently tracking the cases. Experts told us the cases collectively s...
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“Chaos” in the Air: Five Ways Voting Could Be Disrupted on Election Day

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Election workers in Los Angeles County process ballots for the state’s primary in June. Mario Tama/Getty Images As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, voting experts are watching to see how the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to assert more federal control over elections will play out. Since President Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has tried to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls and to restrict mail-in voting . The Department of Homeland Security has used its resources to identify and prosecute noncitizen voters , an effort that has unfolded alongside the agency’s massive crackdown on immigrants. The president has justified these steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and that illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats. Help Us Report on Key Election Issues ProPublica’s reporters are on the lookout for what’s going right and what is...
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