ProPublica

11 Nov 2026 · 2 min · Original

An election-denial tool turned weak identity matches into challenges against living voters

ELLY’s Election Monitor flagged four Forsyth County voters as dead and dozens more as suspect without human verification. The episode shows how a national activist network can convert noisy public records into official-looking challenges at local scale.

ProPublica

7 Nov 2026 · 2 min

Texas Democrats can expose the voucher system before they can abolish it

The state’s new $1 billion school-choice programme survived its first year but not the coalition that created it. Divided government makes repeal uncertain; control of audits and spending rules offers a more immediate route to remake it.

ProPublica & Public accountability

6 Nov 2026 · 3 min · Original

The official opening public land to data centres has up to $64.4mn invested in AI companies

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s holdings appear permissible under the narrow criminal-conflict standard. ProPublica’s investigation nevertheless identifies a governance gap: an official can shape an entire industry’s access to public assets while keeping a large financial stake in that industry.

ProPublica

5 Nov 2026 · 2 min · Original

SafeSport will finally warn schools when sanctioned coaches keep working with children

A public disciplinary database placed the burden on parents and schools to discover a ban themselves. The new notification process closes part of that gap, but it still cannot make organisations outside SafeSport’s jurisdiction enforce the sanction.

ProPublica

2 Nov 2026 · 2 min

Tribal leaders warned the wall would disturb ancestral graves. Fifteen days later, it did

Contractors building a second border wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument unearthed human remains consistent with Indigenous cremation practices. The discovery turns an earlier dispute over consultation into evidence of the damage that consultation was supposed to prevent.

ProPublica

30 Oct 2026 · 2 min

A secret expert vote became the scientific foundation for decades of carbon-capture policy

The IPCC's influential claim that well-managed reservoirs would retain 99% of injected carbon for 1,000 years was not derived from a mature evidence base. It emerged from an undisclosed elicitation that participants agreed to keep off the record.

ProPublica

29 Oct 2026 · 2 min

A US health-research chief promoted menopause policy while holding stock in her own menopause startup

Alicia Jackson's disclosed portfolio connects federal health policy, existing agency contracts and family investments. The unresolved issue is not whether she secretly caused a policy change, but whether HHS built an enforceable boundary around her interests.

ProPublica

28 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

Cleta Mitchell turned election denial into a durable governing network

ProPublica's investigation shows how a lawyer associated with the effort to overturn the 2020 election built a national organization that now connects donors, activists, state officials and the second Trump administration. Its policy wins are incomplete, but its infrastructure has moved fringe claims into government.

ProPublica

27 Oct 2026 · 2 min

Oklahoma spared its worst repeat oil violator because abandoned wells might become the state's problem

Citation Oil & Gas appears more than 1,000 times in Oklahoma’s incident database, yet the state has no record of fining it. The company’s aging assets have become a form of regulatory leverage.

ProPublica

26 Oct 2026 · 2 min

A ransomware recovery company allegedly charged $19mn while quietly paying hackers $8mn

Federal charges against MonsterCloud’s chief mirror a 2019 ProPublica investigation: victims were sold proprietary decryption while the firm allegedly paid ransoms and kept the difference.

ProPublica

25 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

A town of 1,900 shows how mass deportation becomes ordinary police work

Ingram's police handed over the equivalent of 10% of its population after joining ICE's revived task-force programme. Federal stipends and overtime turned traffic stops into an immigration-enforcement system embedded in the town.

ProPublica

23 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

A Utah mink farm has had H5N1 for two months—and no rule requires officials to stop it

Thousands of densely housed mink are infected with bird flu, workers are not being actively monitored and a person with a red eye was never tested. ProPublica finds that the absence of federal mink rules has turned a known adaptation risk into a voluntary response.

ProPublica

22 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

USPS cost cuts doubled or tripled late-ballot rejection rates in affected rural counties

Moving mail processing farther away and halving many local pickups saved less than projected while adding a day to rural ballots’ journey. Emergency election procedures now have to compensate for a delay the Postal Service designed into normal operations.

ProPublica

20 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

The secret Venezuela oil agreement gives Washington control without requiring public ownership transparency

An 18-page agreement reviewed by ProPublica gives the United States discounted oil and a 35% corporate stake, while insulating a private operator and potentially anonymous investors from future political change.

ProPublica

20 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

An FBI bribery inquiry reached Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn—then lost its investigators

A convicted contractor told agents that campaign money bought federal contracts. Records corroborated enough of his account for the FBI to keep investigating, but the public-corruption purge ended the work before the allegations were resolved.

ProPublica

19 Oct 2026 · 2 min

Trump appointees asked the election-security agency to obtain a voting machine secretly—and not tell its maker

The requested test never happened, but it exposes the institutional damage from turning a disclosure-based security program into a political instrument.

ProPublica

16 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

Every decided federal case rejected the Justice Department’s demand for unredacted voter rolls

The Justice Department sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. for confidential voter data. ProPublica’s case-by-case analysis finds that judges appointed by both parties dismissed all 26 cases decided so far, often concluding that the government’s legal theories contradicted the statutes it invoked.

ProPublica

14 Oct 2026 · 2 min · Original

Immigration enforcement is turning an abuser’s deportation threat into leverage

ProPublica found immigrant women detained after domestic-violence calls even when charges were dropped or never filed. The reporting shows how local arrest practices and federal deportation policy can combine to punish the person seeking escape.

ProPublica

13 Oct 2026 · 2 min

Congress is leaving SNAP cards exposed to a fraud that ordinary bank cards largely solved

Organised groups stole an estimated $470mn from food-assistance accounts last year while a known chip-card fix remained unfunded.

ProPublica

10 Oct 2026 · 2 min

A one-minute warning turned border-wall consultation into a test of tribal sovereignty

ProPublica’s reporting shows how a surveillance partnership meant to avoid a wall was redirected toward the Tohono O’odham people resisting one.

ProPublica

6 Oct 2026 · 1 min · Original

ProPublica documents 506 citizens detained during the immigration crackdown

A case-by-case database makes an uncounted consequence of enforcement visible and explains the limits of its count.

ProPublica

29 Sept 2026 · 2 min

A White House grant rule could put disability groups in conflict with voting law

The proposed ban on using federal grants for voter registration would reach organisations that Congress explicitly funds to help disabled Americans vote—and could deter far more nonprofits through ambiguity alone.

ProPublica & DraftKings

26 Sept 2026 · 2 min

A reporter behaved like a problem gambler; DraftKings promoted him to VIP

ProPublica’s ten-week test found that loss-chasing and escalating bets triggered marketing rewards far more effectively than meaningful intervention.

ProPublica & WPLN

25 Sept 2026 · 2 min · Original

Tennessee is spending $360mn on youth prisons while juvenile arrests fall

The state says it lacks specialized beds; the deeper dispute is whether a capacity problem justifies two large institutions when smaller community programmes perform better.