Washington Post to Cover Every Major Race on Election Day With Help of Artificial Intelligence

The Washington Post plans to cover every House, Senate and gubernatorial race in the country on Election Day with the aid of what it describes as artificial intelligence. The plan is to use a data-crunching program called Heliograf, which was built in-house, to bolster efforts by the Post's team of 60 political reporters to provide detailed coverage of nearly 500 contests across the U.S. Reporters will focus their attention on covering high-profile contests and races expected to be close or pivotal, while the program fills in the gaps. "This will give readers Washington Post-quality coverage at all levels but will also be used to alert reporters to things that they may not see, or draw their attention to a particular race that they didn't expect to be a close one," said Jeremy Gilbert, the Post's director of strategic initiatives. The Post first experimented with Heliograf to cover events at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer and will look to expand its use on Election Day. Using templates and pre-written previews, the program will automatically update stories as results come in, said Sam Han, the Post's director of data science.