Some fear Slate, Vice News real-time exit polls on Election Day could change the results

It has been a longstanding tradition for news organizations to refrain from reporting Election Day results until after the polls close in their respective states. That is all going to change on Tuesday when Slate and Vice News partner with Votecastr to "provide real-time projections of how the candidates are faring in each state throughout the day," Politico reports.

The practice is controversial among political reporters, some of whom believe that reporting data while voters are still casting their ballots could change the outcome of the race. "I'm profoundly uncomfortable with characterizing election results during Election Day," ABC News' Ken Goldstein told The New York Times in September. Other organizations like The Associated Press, ABC News, CNN, and Fox News traditionally "huddle in a quarantine room without cell phones, pouring over the earliest exit poll data but declining to release anything that points to an election result until all the polls have closed," Politico reports.

"Each of the six members of the [National Election Pool] have made a pledge before Congress not to make projections based on exit polling before all precincts in each state have closed," explained Joe Lenski, the vice president at Edison Research, which conducts the exit polls.

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But others see such precautionary measures as antiquated or anti-journalistic. "We're hoping to fill in the 24-hour void between the last pre-election poll analysis and the counting of the votes with data that can begin to answer the heretofore unanswerable question: Who's actually voting?" said Votecastr's chief strategist, Sasha Issenberg. He added, "It's not as though voters go to the polls without indications about the state of the horse race."

There is no firm evidence that suggests reporting early projections decreases voter turnout. Still, many other organizations are choosing to refrain from reporting on the outcomes too early: "While we want our poll to provide a real-time look at how voters are feeling on Election Day, we will not be releasing any of our polling on how the candidates are performing prior to poll close on Election Day," Morning Consult's co-founder and chief research offer Kyle Dropp told Politico.