VoteCastr journalist plan to release real-time projections on Election Day

http://ift.tt/2d8N3Th

VoteCastr plans to use computer models to predict statewide results based on select precincts in important states. The models have been used by each party to project winners on Election Day and are now considered quite accurate. Since the 1980's news agencies have sat on this information until polls close, but VoteCastr plans to release it in real time. They are also expected to release the results of the early-voting ballots of states before the polls open.

Some analysts have asserted that releasing East-Coast results (and calling those states) while West-Coast polls are open will not hurt voter turnout and will not have a large impact on down-ballot races.

ETA
http://ift.tt/2d8OlxE

....Everything about election-night journalism has gotten flashier over the generation since—except the scoops. The networks’ early calls prompted a congressional inquiry into whether they had depressed West Coast turnout. The three broadcast networks rejected demands that they wait until everyone in the country had voted to report or forecast any results. (There was scant evidence that NBC’s early call had exerted any influence on voter behavior or outcomes.) As a concession, however, the networks promised not to use their exit polls to project the race in a given state until polls had closed there. In the years that followed, other news organizations that had not been subject to the same political pressure—radio stations, newspapers, wire services, cable networks, and websites—nonetheless accepted it as a controlling precedent.

Now a de-facto self-imposed gag order hangs over the daylight hours of the year’s biggest news event, sequestering the civic exercise of Election Day from the media spectacle of election night. This distinction is enforced only by the pieties of good-government advocates who, in the wake of the 1980 episode, paternalistically argued that voters cannot be trusted with live information. ....Once the polls close, there is intense competition for their decision desks to call states, but up until that point news organizations enforce what amounts to a cartel of silence.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2d725Ft