Who Runs The Election Desk?

On November 3rd, most of the country will watch the US midterm results with a phone in their hand. Their TVs will give them the big map, but the second screen is where people will go to find out what's happening in their own district, what the people they trust are saying, and whether the thing everyone is sharing on their social feeds is real.

Whatever shows up on that second screen, somebody decided it should be there. Usually that's a platform's algorithm, tuned for engagement. We think it should be people you trust.

Last November we previewed this idea with an election feed created by WNYC and Gothamist to follow the New York mayoral race on Bluesky. It delivered 16.7 million posts to 114,000 readers, and at the peak it was serving 1,200 posts a second. Over on X, people searching for results got voter-fraud conspiracies, rage bait and the platform's owner hinting the election was rigged. On Bluesky, they got a real newsroom's feed full of vetted information from real sources, built ahead of time with forethought and intention for the news people would need.

We believe that second model is the future of social media, and we're testing it again at a much larger scale with the midterms - and we need your help to do it. midterms.graze.social runs on Bluesky and the open network it's built on, atproto, so anyone with a Bluesky account can follow along and help run it.

How you can help

You don't need to understand how any of this works under the hood to take part. If you use Bluesky, you can do this.

• Take a desk. Pick your state and help run its feed on election night: suggest the best posts and flag the junk, and if you've curated before, help edit the feed's rules and pin results as they come in. We'll send everyone clear directions before the night.
• Host or join a watch party. Watch the results come in together, scheduled on Smoke Signals and streamed on Stream.place.
• Lend your co/core. If you have a co/core account, lend your machine for the night to help write the hourly summaries.
• Run your own election feed. If you're a newsroom and want a feed of your own, talk to us.

We're giving priority to people who've built feeds on Graze and people who've worked in news, but we'll find a way to get every person involved at some level. Volunteers get an Uncle Sam hat from rpg.actor, written to their own account and theirs to keep.

Take a desk at midterms.graze.social.

A new model for covering elections

An election night is a strange kind of news event. Most breaking news arrives from nowhere: an earthquake, a shooting, an economic meltdown. Election night arrives on a schedule. We know who is on every ballot, which polls close when, and which states count fast and which take a week. Then the night fills in that skeleton with things nobody planned for: a recount, a polling place evacuated over a bomb threat, a fake results screenshot that goes viral before anyone checks it, a race nobody was watching that suddenly flips.

The model for covering election night has to do two things at once: be ready for what we know and adapt quickly to what we don't. Traditional social platform algorithms fall short on both.

For fifteen years, the crowd's answer has been the hashtag. Hashtags gave people shut out of elite media a public channel nobody owned, and movements from #Ferguson to #MeToo used them to push their stories into the mainstream. But they ask a lot. Everyone has to remember to tag every post and spell it the same way, and bad actors can hijack a trending tag to spread misinformation. Beyond the tag itself, there's no way to curate the conversation.

We think feeds are the next phase. A feed keeps what made hashtags powerful: it's built from what ordinary people are actually saying, and nobody has to tag anything for it to work. It adds what hashtags never had: people with their editorial hands on the wheel, working together in real time as the night moves. And its logic is open. When people understand how a feed is built, what sources it draws from and who sets the rules, they have a stronger basis for trusting what's in it.

The newsroom's seat at the table

For twenty years, the people whose job is knowing what is happening in your county have been cut out of the money their work makes. Craigslist alone moved about $5 billion of classified ad spending away from newspapers between 2000 and 2007, and the platforms took the display ads after that. Papers cut their politics desks first, and coverage of local congressional races shrank. The US went from 7,325 newspapers to about 4,490, leaving what Penelope Muse Abernathy named news deserts.

Platforms didn't just take the revenue, they intermediated the relationship with the reader. When Meta switched off news in Canada in 2023 rather than comply with a law requiring platforms to pay for it, outlets lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram almost overnight.

That's what it means not to own your distribution. A feed on atproto is different in kind: an editorial seat and a piece of infrastructure the newsroom actually controls, if they so choose. Nobody can switch it off in a policy change. The reader subscribes to it directly, and the newsroom decides what goes in it, live, with the crowd's posts alongside the newsroom's own reporting rather than competing against it. WNYC and Gothamist showed this works in one city. Our bet is that election-night feeds run by newsrooms could become a normal thing.

What we built

midterms.graze.social is our experiment in all of this.

There are fifty-four feeds: one for every state and DC, a national one, a national desk of 218 vetted sources, and a DC desk of 25 local ones. The open feeds match the names of the people actually on the ballot: 1,392 candidates across 508 Senate, House and governor's races. Names, not hashtags, because names are what people write.

Every feed's definition is public. Open any of them and you can see exactly how it decides what goes in. If you think we got your state wrong, remix it and show us. Readers can sort any feed by new or by trending.

Every race gets a daily summary, labelled machine-written · can be wrong, and every theme in it links to the posts it came from. A summary is a way into the feed, not a replacement for it.

How it works under the hood

For those who want to dig in.

Names are messy. Lots of surnames are ordinary words, and one candidate shares a name with a Kentucky county. We spent weeks in the run-up measuring what each name actually pulls in, and ambiguous names now only count in posts that look like they're about the election. DC got its own desk because almost nobody writes DC candidates' names.

Feed logic is a forward-deployed editor. When a curator writes feed logic, they do their work once and let it run all night. The logic sits in the firehose, pulls in every post that names Susan Collins or Troy Jackson while omitting known spam and abuse, and hands the result to anyone who subscribes. On Graze, a feed can have collaborators in different roles: one edits the logic when a new name breaks, another pins the official results link, another removes the fake screenshot, another promotes the local reporter who is actually at the county clerk's office. They work on the same stream at the same time.

Built on other people's work, on purpose. We've said before that atproto is a standard gauge: since everyone builds to the same track width, everyone's work connects. That let us lean on the work of others in the ecosystem:

• rpg.actor gives every volunteer an Uncle Sam hat, written to their own repo and theirs to keep.
• Smoke Signals and Stream.place run the watch parties. Election night is one of the few times a whole country stays up for the same thing at once. Collective effervescence is one of the most valuable aspects of being in community, and we want to engineer as much of it as we can.
• co/core runs the hourly summaries on machines people lend us: pro bono AI running on the protocol instead of on data centers owned by already too-powerful companies. When co/core can't serve a summary, a commercial model steps in, and we count every time that happens, because whether civic tools can run on people-powered compute is part of the experiment.
• ATlas works out which races are yours, part of a comprehensive geolocation effort to add places as an overlay on the atproto network.
• And we're talking with Blacksky about letting readers personalize the national feed without leaving their app for election night.

None of these took a contract or a partnership deck. They're open protocols and people who want the same thing we do.

Further reading. #HashtagActivism by Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey and Brooke Foucault Welles, on what hashtags made possible. Zeynep Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas, on why networked publics can scale overnight but still struggle to steer.

Take a desk

Election night is three weeks out. The skeleton is already published. What fills it in is up to whoever shows up.

Hashtags showed that the crowd can carry the news. Platforms showed what happens when nobody but the company holds the wheel. We think there's a third way: feeds that the crowd fills and that newsrooms and curators steer, on rails nobody can take away.

Take a desk at midterms.graze.social.