VoteCastr Results: How to get live polling results for Clinton vs Trump

Impact

If you woke up Tuesday morning with nagging feelings of dread and uncertainty, you're not alone: The 2016 presidential election has been a tense nail-biter from start to finish and Election Day isn't shaping up to be any different.

Access to minute-by-minute election results may not necessarily help quell your anxiety, but it'll at least give you a sense of whether the tears you shed at the end of the night will be tears of joy or tears of devastation.

This year, VoteCastr is trying to revolutionize the way Americans consume polling results. In partnership with Slate and Vice, the data collection startup will release election projections all day Tuesday. The projections are available to anyone via Slate's election liveblog and Vice's YouTube livestream

Craig Ruttle/AP

VoteCastr flies in the face of legacy media organizations that have historically embargoed polling results, the data collection team explained on its site.

"They decided it was too dangerous for the public to handle," reads the site. "Politicians agreed with this, believing real time data and projections would keep voters away from the polls and skew the outcome."

VoteCastr's mission is to empower voters by making election results freely available as they trickle in, but there's still concern that the results will give users a skewed perspective on the election, since different voter demographics vote at different times of the day. What's more, those potentially misleading results could dissuade voters from heading out to the polls themselves. 

The Washington Post even went as far as to wonder if the live results would "ruin democracy." But, writer Callum Borchers reasoned, Americans once had similar concerns about airing results on television — a tradition that's now taken for granted.

Concluded Borchers, "...In the debate about whether [VoteCastr] will suppress turnout and take a toll on democracy, it is worth remembering that we have had a similar debate before — and that what was once deemed irresponsible by some soon became the norm."

Correction: Nov. 8, 2016