Keating, now a database
editor with the Washington Post, realized that a large
number of absentee ballots cast for one candidate seemed
strange.
What he did not count on was uncovering an active conspiracy
among Suarez supporters. The conspiracy Keating reported
and the numerous stories that followed won him and the
investigative team he worked with a Pulitzer Prize in
1999.
“I’ve never worked on a story where we
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were so far ahead of the police,” Keating said. “They
were calling and asking us how to find the guy.”
Graduate of Williams College
After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts,
he spent four years covering cops and courts with the Berkshire
Eagle in Pittsfield, Pa. When his first investigative series
ran, Keating said he ended up putting a worldwide evangelical
cult out of business.
“I was always the kind of person to quantify things,”
he said. “I wanted to figure out numbers and how they
are related. I always wanted to tell people things they didn’t
know. CAR offers that.
“When the opportunity came up to do CAR at the Herald,
I jumped on it,” Keating said.
The reporting Keating described seemed much different than
the usual he said-she said type of stories. He delved into
document reporting, submitting one public request for information
after the other. “That’s what CAR is all about.”
During the mayoral election conspiracy, Keating and his team
retrieved documents verifying the addresses of absentee voters.
They knocked on doors to make sure the voter was alive and
the address was valid. But they also went looking for households
with more than a couple constituents.
They found voters living outside the city, yet their ballots
were signed as city residents. They also found nests, or places
where voters parked illegal votes. One nest revealed a husband
and wife living at an address where six voters supposedly
lived. Other findings revealed invalid addresses and names
on ballots of people who never even voted.
“One of them was a police sergeant who swore up and
down he had done nothing wrong,” Keating said. “Turns
out his wife was a supporter of this guy.”
Suspect's wife confesses to FBI
Keating described how the wife ended up confessing her part
in the plot to her Baptist church during Sunday service. She
ended up going to the FBI in an attempt to salvage her husband’s
career. Agents asked her to wear a 'wire' to get the head
of the conspiracy on tape.
“She got him on tape playing the Cuban race card,”
he said.
According to Keating, there are lots of good reporters, but
very few of them can or want to work with data. As he sees
it, understanding the story and doing the analysis are the
keys to CAR .
“We do the analysis to find the story,” he said.
“Sadly that’s hard to teach. And I t takes a long
time to get the data you need.”
As for advice, Keating emphasized pushing the right buttons.
It also helps to work in a state with open public record laws
like Virginia. Keating’s work with the right documents
proved more than 300 invalid absentee votes had been cast.
“Since most documents are kept electronically, you
must cope with them in an electronic fashion,” Keating
said. “There’s a huge appetite for online material,”
Keating said. “But we can’t figure out how to
generate a money stream like newspapers produce. If we don’t
come up with a way, we’ll go out of business.”
Multiplatform reporting
In today’s multimedia world, electronic reporting appears
to reinforce the need for online material, which is then shared
with other media. For instance, when the Washington Post purchased
a radio station, reporters were told to contribute to the
program by answering questions about the story each reporter
wrote, Keating said.
In the end, the work of Keating and his reporting team resulted
in the Florida judge throwing out all the absentee votes.
Criminal charges were brought against Suarez, but during the
trial his defense attorney was caught making out with his
Suarez’s wife. The other 56 people charged in the conspiracy
went to the courthouse and pled the Fifth.
“This was one of my favorite days in journalism,”
he said. “The work we did severely affected the voting
results in Florida during the 2000 presidential elections,”
resulting in a recount.
Read
more about Dan Keating
Return
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•
Danielle Cervantes, San Diego Union-Tribune
• Dave
Davis, Cleveland Plain Dealer
• Dan
Keating, Washington Post
• Tom
Merriman, Fox 8 Cleveland
• Doug
Oplinger, Akron Beacon Journal
• Craig
Pittman and Matthew Waite, St. Petersburg Times
• Mark
Schaver, Louisville Courier-Journal
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