The consortium of news organizations sponsoring the NORC Florida ballot project is made up of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post Co., Tribune Publishing, CNN, Associated Press, St. Petersburg Times and The Palm Beach Post. The New York Times owns The Boston Globe, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and the Lakeland Ledger among others. Washington Post Co. owns The Washington Post and Newsweek. Tribune, based in Chicago, owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, among others.

The consortium joined together to retain NORC, because they wanted a comprehensive in-depth inventory of all uncounted votes in Florida’s November 2000 Presidential race that would be immune from charges of political bias or methodological weakness. Consortium members will have access to the raw data for a brief period before public release of the database, from which they will develop their own analyses and stories about what the uncounted ballots reveal.