Georgetown University students joined Decision Desk HQ, an election results provider and website, at the McCourt School of Public Policy’s downtown campus to report the results of the Massachusetts state primaries Sept. 3. 

Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) has established an election hub at the McCourt School of Public Policy for the 2024 election cycle, allowing students to gain insight into the data and models behind polling and election predictions. DDHQ has predicted elections since its founding in 2012, using a combination of forecasting models and rapid data input on election nights to quickly predict races down the ballot. 

Last semester, DDHQ invited Georgetown students to join their remote election night monitoring team, where they began to work alongside ground reporters and automated website scrapers to transfer vote-count data into DDHQ’s models as county-level election officials release it. 

Brandon Finnigan, the director of elections at DDHQ, said this comprehensive coverage allows the organization to streamline the vote-count data intake, especially in states like Massachusetts, where counties publish their election results in a variety of ways, often very slowly. 

“States can do weird things, counties can do weird things, so we need as a fallback people who can report those counties for us,” Finnigan said at the event. 

In anticipation of the November election, DDHQ also trained more than 20 new student reporters during the Massachusetts primary. 

Francin Isabel Vasquez (CAS ’24), one of the new reporters, said she joined the monitoring team because she wanted an easy way to get involved with politics. 

“I think with the election year coming up, I want to get a bit more involved with it. I feel like at Georgetown we all get involved somehow, but it’s a very cool opportunity,” Vasquez told The Hoya. “I’ll just learn how to collect the data and put it in the system and make it go live. That’s something that interests me.” 

Finnigan said he is highly conscious of the conspiracy theories surrounding the upcoming presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. 

“People will take everything as you’re part of the machine trying to take over the country or the world,” Finnigan said. “It’s serious business.” 

To avoid accusations of election fraud, Finnigan told the student election reporters to handle their work objectively and accurately by inputting the vote-count data as it is received from county clerks, regardless of their personal opinions. 

“If the outcome of the presidential election goes against the way you want it to go, and it’s going to affect the way you do this, there’s no shame in saying you don’t want to do this,” Finnigan said. “The show has to go on. Data has to go in. Results have to keep coming out.” 

Katie Taffe (CAS ’27), a returning student reporter with DDHQ, said she is already thinking about making this mental adjustment to work with DDHQ in November so she will be able to stay focused on the counties assigned to her, rather than fixate on the result of the presidential race. 

“I’m a little nervous about it,” Taffe told The Hoya. “I think there’ll be a little bit of separation between my actual feelings that I have about the election results and what I’ll have to do for my job, because I don’t report every single election in every single precinct in this country, so I’ll only see a very small portion of the results.”

Zoe Auld (CAS ’27), a data science intern with DDHQ, said the limited accessibility of election information in many counties can make it difficult for voters, analysts and student monitors alike to get the data they need to participate in elections. 

“I learned about how random a lot of this is with these counties, tiny counties, that run everything at the county level on Facebook pages,” Auld told The Hoya. “Even just finding out who the candidates are who are running can be really, really difficult. We have to do a lot of running around, a lot of chasing down clerks.” 

Regardless of the challenges of the job, Taffe said she values having an inside look into how groups like DDHQ predict results on election night. 

“You can see how election results are shaped, kind of as they come in. You get to watch them live, which I think is super cool to see them evolve as the night goes on,” Taffe said. “I think it’s a really cool opportunity that not many other schools have.”