The Pulse: Real-Time Turnout

At precisely 11:12 p.m., on Nov. 6, 2012, America learned that Barack Obama had been reelected president. The call - made first by NBC - probably came as no surprise to either the Obama or Mitt Romney campaigns, both of which operated sophisticated war rooms tracking their needed voter turnout. So here's a question:

Why should the public be out of that loop? If the campaigns know how they are doing in real time, why can't that information be made available to the public?

"There is no secret sauce in this. Campaigns have been doing it for decades," said Ken Smukler, who is trying to change the status quo, where the only reports during the voting on Election Day are about the weather and subjective assessments about "heavy" turnout.

The veteran of Philadelphia political wars is the founder of VoteCastr, a project that has teamed him with some Silicon Valley tech types and Slate.com. Smukler thinks he's poised to give Americans insight into who is winning the election as the voting is taking place.

Here's how it will work: Come Nov. 8, VoteCastr will disperse hundreds of representatives to predetermined polling places to track actual turnout. These locales will represent polling places believed to strongly favor Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, allowing the easy tracking of how each camp is doing in getting out its core vote. That will then allow modeling to project the outcome in larger areas. The plan is to do this for the presidential race and competitive Senate campaigns in seven swing states, including Pennsylvania.

It's a concept Smukler first piloted in 2003, using my CBS radio platform in Philadelphia, an experiment he now refers to as his "proof of concept." That election was a rematch of the 1999 John Street/Sam Katz mayoral race, which was decided by a razor-thin margin of less than two percentage points. Street received just 9,447 votes more than Katz, and voter turnout citywide was 44.8 percent. Their rematch four years later was made famous by the late discovery of an FBI listening device in Mayor Street's City Hall office.

On Election Day in 2003, Smukler engaged students from the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, and paid them to camp out at 50 polling places scattered across the city. Any seasoned observer could have easily projected the wards each candidate would win largely based upon the race of the residents - the open question was the margin. Smukler believed that by tracking the turnout in areas decidedly pro-Street or pro-Katz, he could gain real-time insight into the big picture. Toward that end, the students made reports every few hours on turnout.

I pulled the radio tape from my noon broadcast that Election Day to remember how the information was culled and disseminated. The ending wasn't spoiled - instead, it sounded like a running commentary of a live news event. For example, Smukler's data showed that, one hour into voting, at 8 a.m., Katz was turning out 5 percent of his vote while Street was at 3.9 percent. By 11 a.m., Street was turning out 10.5 percent of his vote while Katz was at 9.8 percent. When Smukler then ranked all 50 locales he was tracking, nine of the top 10 performers were in Street strongholds. But he warned that it was incorrect to judge what was going on based on the top performers alone.

"What these numbers give you is just a snapshot of what is going on out there," he cautioned at the time. Just before 1 p.m., I asked him where things stood.

"The morning rounds are over," he replied. "Katz landed some hard blows in the initial rounds, but it looks like Street came back toward the end of the morning."

I recently played the tape of that broadcast for Smukler. Neither of us had heard it in 13 years.

"I do recall that we did make a call that said Katz would be losing this race by double digits," he recently said. (Street won convincingly: 58.34 percent to 41.34 percent.)

"But I want you to remember something else," he added. "Remember we were doing this for a . . . [CBS] station. And I was read the riot act by the lawyers at the station who said, 'You cannot give [result] numbers. The only thing we will let you do on our air is to give people a sense and you must disclaim at all times what your numbers are.' . . . That's not exactly what I'm doing right now. This time we're going to give the numbers."

Some worry that release of real-time turnout information will suppress or otherwise impact the vote.

Veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield told me the idea made him think of the 1980 election, which was called for Ronald Reagan before the polls had closed in California.

"If reporters are using modern tools to 'model' what's going on while it's going on," he said, "I have the same kind of question: Do campaigns that hear they are lagging redouble their efforts, or do their followers say, 'It's hopeless'? I don't know. But I fear an outbreak of total, uncontrolled hysteria by 2 p.m."

My observations in the 2003 mayor's race left me less concerned. What I most recall was the excitement that the analysis added while there was still time to energize voters who had yet to cast ballots. I doubt anyone who listened to Smukler's data stayed away from the polls. Instead, it was like hearing the play-by-play of a sporting event where you could get off the sofa or out of your car and influence the outcome. And if that causes more people to vote, that'll be a good thing.

Michael Smerconish can be heard

from 9 a.m. to noon on SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124 and seen

hosting "Smerconish" at 9 a.m. Saturdays on CNN.