Votecastr: real-time election projections

I am guessing many of your have read about Votecastr which is doing real-time projections in partnership with Slate. Here is the pageexplaining what they are doing and here is the actual tracker.

Not sure how meaningful the current projections are but undoubtedly they will get better and better as the day progresses. Right now Hillary is in a very comfortable position especially +4 in Florida. She is projected to be ahead in 7 of the 8 states they look at; she is -1 in Iowa.

It will be interesting to see at what point of the day their projections come close to whatever the final numbers are and also what impact this will have on other news organizations in future elections.

I might question how valid the projections are as the person running that site is a known Hillary supporter and is discussed in some of the wikileaks.

You mean Ken Smukler? A quick search of wikileaks seems to show the only mention of him is as campaign manager for a congresswoman and he’s only mentioned briefly in one letter chain. So all I can say is that he’s a Dem associated professional pollster.

Deosn’t necessarily mean its wrong. The methodology is public, they are very modest in their claims, and so far the results aren’t showing a blow out so I don’t see any reason to believe that there is intentional bias here.

The real question (as they point out) is that there could easily be a strong temporal effect to voting. Early voters may be a very different demographic that late ones, so there could be large changes once the after work crowd hits.

The Slate article says they have data experts from both parties including a former political director for the RNC and anyway their overwhelming professional interest is to get it right, not bias it towards a candidate.

Especially in Florida, where part of the state (the more conservative part) is in a different time zone.

Besides, why bias it either way? It won’t affect the actual vote and you look like an idiot if it’s way off.

It would be fairly easy to control for such basic effects though especially if they have obtained good data from previous elections which may be the point of having former political operatives on their team. If they are still around in four years, they will have even better data to benchmark with.

Well one of the arguments made by news organizations against revealing such projections is that they could affect voters during the day. But it’s not clear how you would bias your numbers even if your goal is to help a candidate and of course their professional interest cuts strongly against doing that.

Hillary has already surpassed Obama’s 2012 total vote count in FL: 4,225,249 vs. 4,161,850.

Trump is behind Romney: 3,947,947 vs. 4,050,540.

I saw that. I read earlier today that Florida’s population/# registered voters had grown a lot since 2008, but not sure how much of that growth is since 2012?

Holy shit! While the polls are open!?

Do you not have a law against this?

Not all real vote tallies for today (which is why I glance in, but don’t take as gospel). Uses exit polls, etc.

Their description

It’s why “projected” is there, I guess. Mind you, there will be some projection at the news stations later tonight, too. Fills up time before all the votes have been counted.

Why would we need one?

I’m not aware of any laws, but I believe it’s considered unethical journalism.

As of 3:40 PM EST, turnout has already exceeded 2012 totals.

The main ethical argument against it I’ve heard is that it could affect votes in later states (west coast, the best coast). I’m skeptical that it’s significant in effect. Only politics nerds are checking Votecastr or whatever it’s called - those people are voting (or not voting) regardless.

But do we know how it relative to total # of registered voters? What percentage has already voted this year vs. did in 2012?

This comment (sorry to pick on it) is a great example of how facts are becoming politicized: this person is a member of Party X, therefore they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything.

It’s ad hominem.