On September 10, 2016, Votecastr was profiled in The New York Times by Nick Corasaniti,[1] and announced its partnership with Slate.com to publish the data on Election Day.
[2] Additionally, co-founder Sasha Issenberg published a piece on Slate.com outline Votecastr's Election Day strategy.
[3] During the U.S. Presidential Election of 1980, NBC News projected Reagan as the winner at 8:15 pm EST (5:15 PST), before voting was finished in the West, based on exit polls; it was the first time a broadcast network used exit polling to project a winner, and took the other broadcast networks by surprise.
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.
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.