We Investigated ‘Whose Vote Counts.’ Our Findings Unfold Tonight.

As the 2020 election year approached, our team was already digging into the shifting landscape of voter disenfranchisement and election integrity in our country, looking closely at what had changed since the Supreme Court in 2013 invalidated a core provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Then came the coronavirus — and accompanying questions about what happens when more Americans try to vote via mail-in ballot than ever before: Whose vote counts? Whose doesn’t? And why?

With Columbia Journalism School, Columbia Journalism Investigations and reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and USA TODAY, we’ve spent the past seven months seeking answers and co-publishing stories along the way. Our findings unfold in full tonight in Whose Vote Counts, a documentary from historian, New Yorker writer and Columbia professor Jelani Cobb; director and Columbia professor June Cross; and producer Thomas Jennings. You can watch an extended trailer above.

Against the backdrop of America’s history around voting rights and voter suppression, we scrutinized one of the first votes held during the pandemic: Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary election. In those long lines, claims of disenfranchisement, unprecedented numbers of absentee ballots and dueling legal battles between Republicans and Democrats, we uncovered lessons for the country as a whole as November approaches.

And in an analysis conducted with Columbia Journalism Investigations and reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and USA TODAY, we found that, in the upcoming presidential election:

• Absentee ballot rejections are expected to disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic communities — the same people who historically have been disenfranchised from the electoral process and who have been among those hit hardest by COVID-19.
• Both absentee voting and absentee ballot rejections are projected to reach unprecedented levels — and more than one million people could have their votes discarded.
• We also found that the predicted surge in rejected ballots isn’t likely to be due to voter fraud. Rather, as our colleagues put it, it’s “the byproduct of 200 million eligible voters navigating an often-confusing process where simple mistakes can cost a vote.”

For the full story, watch Whose Vote Counts. The documentary premieres tonight at 10/9c on PBS (check your local listings) and on YouTube, and will be available to stream beginning at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS Video App. Plus: Join the team behind the film tomorrow evening at 7/6c for a special virtual discussion on voter suppression in America with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.