The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has nominated the ProPublica project “Meet the Woman Fighting for the Rights of Voters Who Can’t Read” for a News & Documentary Emmy Award in the outstanding soft feature story: short form category.

For decades, conservative politicians have passed laws that make it both harder for voters who struggle to read to cast a ballot and, at the same time, discourage anyone trying to help them. Olivia Coley-Pearson knows this better than most. She has been criminally charged twice in the past decade for her attempts to help people navigate their ballots; she has never been found guilty of any wrongdoing. She serves as a city commissioner in Douglas, the majority-Black seat of Coffee County, Georgia, where a third of the population struggles to read.

In the short film, ProPublica’s journalists followed Coley-Pearson on the day of Georgia’s primary elections in May 2022 to capture her efforts to give voters access to assistance. The video was directed and edited by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, who collaborated on the cinematography with Zach Read. It was executive produced by Almudena Toral, with additional production by Aliyya Swaby, Annie Waldman and Rodríguez Pons.

In the series “The Right to Read: Examining the Toll of America’s Literacy Crisis,” co-published with Gray TV/Investigate TV, ProPublica chronicles the persistent suppression of low-literacy voters, found that places with lower estimated literacy rates tended to also have lower turnout, wrote about successful voting reforms, and published a guide on how to get help with voting.

See the list of all News & Documentary Emmy nominees here.