The Mississippi Free Press is using journalism to “make democracy work a little better.”
Columbia Journalism Review interviews Ashton Pittman, news editor of the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press in Jackson, whose reporters spent more than a week after Election Day tracking affidavit ballots in the too-close-to-call Senate race between Cindy Hyde-Smith and Scott Colom. Pittman describes the site's years-long habit of calling all eighty-two counties to verify polling places — eighteen were wrong in the latest cycle — and says the paper fills gaps in the state's decentralized system to help voters and make democracy work a little better.
