Announcing the Election Data Analytics team | The New York Times Company

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September 7, 2022
Announcing the Election Data Analytics team
In advance of this year’s midterm elections the newsroom is launching a new team focused on data analysis of elections across the country. Read more in this note from assistant managing editor for data journalism Matt Ericson.
I am excited to introduce the first members of the newsroom’s Election Data Analytics team, a new group tasked with expanding election-related analytical journalism. This group is part of our ambitious plan to expand the breadth and depth of our data journalism, which has already become a signature part of our report.
The Times has become the pre-eminent destination on election nights for tens of millions of Americans who turn to us for the latest election results and for clear statistical analysis that demonstrates how the races are actually playing out. But we want to continue to innovate in this area. As we head into the midterms and look toward the 2024 presidential election, we must expand our ability to quickly understand, analyze and explain the election — particularly at this moment, when the credibility of election results reporting, data and analysis is more important than ever before.
The Elections Data Analytics team will be joined by Nate Cohn, our chief political analyst, and other members of The Upshot to initially focus on two of the biggest hallmarks of our elections coverage: our public opinion surveys and the statistical models that power the Needle. This work will also bolster The Times’s ability to call races when necessary.
To lead the team this election cycle, the Business desk has let us borrow William Davis through November. Will joined The Times in 2015 on the News Platforms team, working with The Scoop and news products teams on a wide variety of projects, including serving as the product lead for the development of our new photo tools for the newsroom. In 2020, he returned to his editing roots, working as an assistant editor on the Business desk.
Before The Times, Will oversaw product and technology at the Bangor Daily News, where he led efforts to tabulate results from federal, state and local races in every precinct in Maine and to build a model to help call races. The newspaper was the leading source of election news for the state and syndicated its results to the A.P. and to Reuters.
Also on the team is Ilana Marcus, who joined The Times full-time in May as a developer working on acquiring the data needed to power an accurate election-night model, such as real-time, precinct-level results. Ilana first worked with The Times as a contractor in 2020 building data feeds for exit polls. After the election, she worked with the Covid data acquisition team, where she helped maintain more than 300 scrapers as part of our Pulitzer-winning effort to be a comprehensive source of data on the virus’s spread.
Prior to The Times, Ilana was the investigative data editor at CQ Roll Call, and before that a Knight data fellow at The Washington Post, where she integrated machine-generated chat updates into The Post’s 2018 election night livestream. She has also worked as a full-stack engineer on predictive analytics for intensive care unit patients and websites for major nonprofits. She has a degree in computer science from Tufts and a master’s in journalism from Northwestern.
Irineo Cabreros joined in July as staff editor for statistical modeling. He comes to us from the RAND Corporation, where he was a statistician who supported research in a diverse range of domains, including health care, incarceration, substance use and military personnel. Much of his work focused on issues surrounding algorithmic bias, whereby algorithms inadvertently perpetuate or exacerbate societal biases across sensitive attributes like race and ethnicity.
Irineo completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Princeton in 2020, where he developed methods for analyzing high-dimensional genomic datasets. In 2018, Irineo wrote for the science desk at Slate Magazine as a mass media fellow through the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ruth Igielnik joined the team last week as staff editor for news surveys. Ruth comes to us from the Pew Research Center, where she was a senior researcher. Her work there included polling on social and demographic trends shaping the country, such as gender and gender roles at the workplace and at home, community type differences, parenting and generational change. Ruth is also deeply knowledgeable about working with voter files and likely voter models, two key parts of our polls. She co-created Pew’s validated voter survey, which used commercial voter files to provide a detailed portrait of who actually voted during each of the past three presidential election cycles. She has also assessed the different likely voter models that pollsters use to predict election turnout.
Ruth is an active member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and serves on its Transparency Initiative committee, which encourages more-transparent research methodologies. She has a master’s in public policy from Carnegie Mellon and a degree in political science from the University of Maryland.
The team is partnering closely with Politics and other desks on polling, and with the teams in Graphics, Interactive News and Digital News Design that design and build our election results pages.
— Matt Ericson