Americans deserve real-time projections of turnout on Election Day

Campaigns, however, do know who is winning the game as it is being played. They have never relied on exit polls, which were designed to illuminate who voted and why, for the benefit of postelection analysis, not to predict results in real time. Instead, candidates, parties, and super PACs use a combination of analytics and active tracking of turnout across preselected precincts to produce rolling projections of how many votes they have won as the ballots are cast. They have found this method to be uncannily accurate at matching the ultimate vote count.

Voters have never had access to such analytics, but there is no reason that journalists can’t apply the same methods as the campaigns—and there are very good reasons why doing so is in the public interest. A group of election veterans has therefore come together to form a new company called Votecastr, in which I am a partner, and we are building our own version of that Election Day data apparatus. In partnership with Slate, Votecastr will publicly debut its system on Nov. 8. From the moment that polls open on the East Coast, Slate readers will know as much about how many votes Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have accumulated across the battleground states as Hillary and Donald and their teams do. Our goal is not to beat the networks and wire services to declaring winners and losers—election night will still belong to their analysts and their magic walls—but to guarantee that citizens who have been entrusted with a vote also have access to as much information as possible about how their fellow citizens are voting.