Earlier today, we went live with VoteCastr’s early vote numbers from a set of seven battleground states. You can check out our analysis of the data from Colorado and look at the early-vote numbers from Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. VoteCastr is combining those early-vote tallies with turnout-based estimates of votes being cast on Election Day to assess which candidate is leading in each of these states at any particular moment. You can now see those figures update on Slate in real time as they come in.
We had originally planned on bringing you those real-time estimates early this morning. There have been two issues, however, in getting this experiment off the ground. The first is that while VoteCastr’s trackers have been (and continue to be) out in the field today, VoteCastr’s data team ran into technical difficulties that prevented us from presenting that data on Slate. The second is that our data visualizations were designed to show a combination of early-vote and live turnout data. The unexpected delay before we started receiving that live turnout data meant our visualizations showed only early vote totals, which remained largely static this morning. Now that real-time turnout data has started pouring in, our visualizations should continue to update in real time.
