As promised, here is a look at the first of several projects highlighted in the nomination letters sent to the EPpy folks. The hope is this provides insight on what might have led judges to name HeraldTribune.com as a finalist for best news site and best newspaper-affiliated site.

By 10 o'clock election night, Herald-Tribune political writer and blogger Jeremy Wallace knew something was wrong. The number of votes Sarasota County was reporting in its nasty and hard-fought Congressional race – the most expensive U.S. House race ever – was too low. Way too low. Reporter David Gulliver, covering a local hospital board race, walked up and said the county was reporting more votes for hospital board than Congress.

Thus began a fury of reporting to find out what happened – and whether the missing votes would have changed the outcome of the second-closest House race in the country.

By the time the newspaper’s first story about the undervote hit doorsteps, the investigative team’s analysis had been turned into an interactive map. The map plotted Sarasota County's disputed undervote by precinct, letting readers investigate for themselves whether their polling place was affected – and whether solidly Democratic precincts were more or less likely to have a high undervote.

The next step online producers took really made their work standout. The voting results database was tied to user-submitted reports from voters, who described what happened at their precincts. Were you cautioned by a poll worker about the District 13 race? Did you see the race the first time you went through your ballot? More than 300 voters replied. Their answers helped prove that poor ballot design caused the undervote. All of our multimedia coverage is archived at www.HeraldTribune.com/District13.

Covering the undervote began with converged coverage of Election Night that included video from the winners and losers speeches, a live blog contributed to by dozens of reporters stationed in our three-county coverage area, and live election results that fed into the Web and then reverse-published to the newspaper and in live graphics on our 24-hour television news station, SNN News 6. And election coverage began months earlier with “topics pages” on each of the major races and Web-only interviews with 68 participating candidates.

Credit for this project belongs to too many people to name individually. Obviously, the entire investigate team was a vital cog. And on election night, every member of the Web team was on hand.

Charlie Szymanski and Maurice Tamman, creators of IBISEYE.com, created the election results reporting system and the precinct map.

Melissa Worden was charged with harvesting as much raw video from our TV photogs as possible. The results, in the form of speeches and reports from candidate HQs, are more numerous than even we'd anticipated.

Leigh Caldwell built the topics pages, candidate interviews and helped organize the newsroom to collect data from users about the undervote. In our latest election, not mentioned in this letter, Leigh brought in each candidate for video interviews that were then "reverse-published" to our TV station in clips.