Some Beaver County residents in the South Side Area School District might be interested to know three policies are on the agenda tonight about bathrooms, sex-based distinctions on sports teams and requiring parents be informed if a student wants to use a different name or gender It's something I'm very familiar with. We've seen policies like these crop up across the state since at least last year. Now, it'd be one thing if these were naturally occuring policies within a community, but I don't think that's the case. Let me show you something...

Got held up with a few things (and a recount delayed this way back) but I finally got to sit and analyze the voter rolls in Bucks. For brevity's sake, the story below focused on Central Bucks and Pennridge but ...🧵
bit.ly/4aOheJ9
There was so much stuff I didn't get to dive into that I love talking about.
First, these are the voting precincts shaded by towns based on higher percentage of Dems or Reps on their voter rolls.
Upper Bucks is more rural, land doesn't vote people do yadda yadda moving on 🧵2/?

Almost two months ago, @willcarless, @aliaemily and I wrote this story about the influence the website BookLooks (BL) has on library challenges across the country. I thought I'd take another look at how the site has grown since then 1/??? bit.ly/3LOjcyG
By way of background: BookLooks included reviews for about 630 titles as of Sept. 7, about 40% citing "alternate" sexualities or gender identities to justify their placement on a 0 to 5 rating scale. All but 131 books contained "sex" or "gender" in their concern summaries. 2/???

In about 12 hours, three stories will go live by @BethMRodgers and I based on a review of what we found when we searched "transgender" in school district policies across the state. You can read those tomorrow morning, but for now I wanted to explain how we did it. 1/11 This project first started with our work looking into how a religious liberty law firm and its parent group have been influencing school districts behind the scenes. 2/11 bit.ly/3N2HUfF

Pending an appeal or some unforeseen legal challenge, Central Bucks will go from a nine-region district to a three region district to elect its nine-member board in 2025. This story includes a region map w/precincts and an election schedule. But ...🧵 1/12 bit.ly/3G4zpfT
"Friday was a busy day for me (finished this campaign finance story with @JoCiavaglia) and I wasn't able to delve too deep into
how these three regions change the political landscape in CBSD 2/12" bit.ly/3u1dXWe

Just in time for #BannedBooksWeek, @willcarless @aliaemily and I delved into BookLooks, a content rating website with ties to Moms for Liberty and a vital tool in a movement to ban books in public libraries. Check it out! Now, a 🧵 on how we did it 1/20bit.ly/3LOjcyG BookLooks has been something I've wanted to dig into more since I wrote this column in June (more info on comic book censorship from @CBLDF btw). It seemed like all the "obscene" books in viral board meeting videos were on that list of over 550 titles 2/20bit.ly/3IDupAe

Over 600 titles are featured on , a website containing content guides for school libraries based on book reports from “concerned parents” across the country. I touched on a bit of the data in this essay, but I've got more now. https://t.co/Rstw4Exvoz 1/16BookLooks.org
bit.ly/3IDupAe Reading every single book report is a hefty job, so I've spent the last few months developing a database of book report info by scraping the BookLooks website, downloading every PDF and then scraping the first page of the PDF. 2/16bit.ly/3CJTRRt

Learned something new working with @geopandas just now that could be helpful for other @PythonPr nerds. I was prepping for York County election results by voting precinct but I hit a snag when I found York 5-3 was split by a congressional district on the map 1/8 Since this is a municipal election, we're only going to get results for 5-3 as a whole, which means both polygons would be filled with the same numbers. I didn't want to have a blank spot on the map either 2/8

Some Republican activists who have backed claims that voting by mail is corrupt are now advising GOP committees to embrace the ballot option in coming elections. Here's the story @BethMRodgers and I published this week. bit.ly/3L2gYMj 1/17 The story is a continuation of two earlier stories we wrote. The first about one county GOP committee's move further right ... bit.ly/3iKw11u 2/17

Leaked library policy administrative regulations in Central Bucks suggested an outside group edited a draft made by the district's library coordinator. When I asked about this, the district sent out a mass email confirming the group's involvement.
bit.ly/3wgfeGI When I asked for an update on the library regulations last week, I was told the district didn't post them publicly. I filed an RTK to get the official version.
I already had a leaked copy that was identical to what the district sent me.

Election Day is here! More than 8.8 million voters will have the chance to cast their vote for state and federal leaders until the polls close at 8 p.m. tonight. Democrats make up about 46% of the state’s voter rolls compared to 39% for Republicans. 1/13 About 31% of all voters are in Southeast PA. Philadelphia alone accounts for 12% of the state’s voter rolls, with its suburban neighbors making up 19% of all voters. Apart from the 10% of voters in Allegheny, most counties account for 1% or less of the total rolls. 2/13

With about a month to go before the midterm election, I was curious about how often PA’s 8.78 million voters have headed to the polls in the past. It’s complicated but fascinating, so let’s dive in with a data thread. 1/16 First thing’s first, we’re looking at the voter registration data from Sept. 26 (still on vacation). The data has a column for voting method and party of each election going back to the early 2000s, but I’m just focusing on columns since 2010 — so, 12 elections. 2/16

On vacation, but let's take a quit look at voter numbers. We're less than 37 days until the midterm elections in Pennsylvania, and it looks like new voter registrations are really ramping up. 1/11 There have been about 31,259 new registrations this month (up to Sept. 26, my most recent voter reg export). That's about 5,800 more voters than Aug. and almost 1,600 more new voters than June, which was the highest month for new registrations previously 2/11

By request of @jgcOCANADA I wanted to take a little bit of a closer look at our post-Dobbs spike in PA, this time by municipality. This is an extension of last week's thread here

https://twitter.com/ulleryatintell/status/1561059494850924544?s=20&t=ZKMhkah53URooeRCnZ-pjg1/16

I could start with #BucksCounty but I thought it'd be more interesting to look at the SEPA region of Philly, Bucks, Chester, MontCo and DelCo. Like most of the state, Dems have seen the biggest increases after Dobbs overall. 2/16

Something we didn't really get into with last week's story with @BethMRodgers about a spike in new voters (linked) was the geography of it all. A thread by @lara_putnam made me want to go back through that now. bit.ly/3Ce29SG 1/17 Republican voters lead Democrats across most of PA's 67 counties. Only 15 counties have more Democrats than GOP voters, but the highest lead the Reps have in any one county is about 64,000 voters where Dems have 679K lead in Philly 2/17

This week, @BethMRodgers and I looked into a spike of new voters that came after the June 24 Dobbs ruling that kicked abortion back to the states. I've linked the story here, but I want to unpack some of this sweet, sweet voter data bit.ly/3Ce29SG 1/13 First, I'm going to be using the voter registration export from the PA Dept of State updated on Monday. The story uses data from a week ago, but here's what the party make up looks like right now. 2/13

Pennsylvania voters, most of them, will have a chance to cast their ballot for Republican and Democratic nominees for state and federal races on Tuesday. Those races are also mostly going to to be including the newly draw district maps. Let's talk numbers, shall we? 1/23 🧵 There are about 8.73 million voters, but about 1.28 million of them aren't registered as Republican or Democrat, leaving about 3.4 million Republican voters and about 4 million Democratic voters. We've got some pretty contentious races this month bit.ly/39n6p5I 2/23

We saw a campaign to remove several books from Central Bucks libraries begin in earnest this week. The link below is my story on this week’s meeting, but there’s something else I wanted to expand on: the Miller test. bit.ly/3tOs7Gt 1/20 The Miller test came up at the start of this week’s meeting, when a resident laid the groundwork for what was too “obscene” to be in a school library. The test is based on a 1973 US Supreme Court decision for Miller V California. bit.ly/3KI5bj1 2/20

So, I saw this tweet earlier today about AuditTheVotePA and some claims about voter data. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's begin.

https://twitter.com/jgcOCANADA/status/1490330008845524997?s=20&t=IraHwn4NP3sByFJeUhFsMQ

1/27 There's a great story by @CarterLNP of @LancasterOnline about the group's claims in Lancaster County, and gives a good background on the group as a whole. The section of ATVPA's website offering to "see the data" on its claims is my main issue. bit.ly/3Lp4fBg 2/27

Well, given what's going with this legal challenge to Act 77, I wanted to go over some voter stats real quick. buckscountycouriertimes.com/story/news/sta… 1/12 As of Jan. 24, there were about 8.7 million registered voters in PA. About 46% are Democrat, 39% Republican and almost 15% Independent, no affiliation or among one of more than 300 party affiliations recognized by the Dept. of State. 2/12

Some thoughts on the voter information subpoenaed by the Senate this week. The investigation website explains the motivations as an effort to restore confidence in election results in the commonwealth. This graphic is featured prominently. 1/23 Muhlenberg did find that ~1/3 of PA voters weren't confident in the election results, but also found 49% of people were very confident in the results and that the election was fair; 52% thought Biden won and 50% were not confident that there was widespread election fraud. 2/23