Devil's advocate: reporting on the polling numbers as they come in can cloud the decisions people make at the polls, and the entire process of trying to determi

Devil's advocate: reporting on the polling numbers as they come in can cloud the decisions people make at the polls, and the entire process of trying to determine who's winning serves no useful purpose in daily life other than as pure subjective entertainment. Normally I would say we should all just use online voting (edit: online registration & mailed voting) the way 3 states (Washington, Oregon, and Nevada) currently do. They provide real-time statistics on their voting results via their website. But at the same time there's those risks of security holes. For example, I took 30 seconds to look at Washington's voter registration website, and found this via Google: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ues5maE5tbsJ:https://weiappletsqa.sos.wa.gov/LanguageAdmin/Pages/Applets.aspx+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ues5ma... This makes it appear as though some admin functions may have been accessible publicly in the past. It is nice to get a look at their content management, though (http://weihelp.sos.wa.gov/help/support/_layouts/viewlsts.aspx http://weihelp.sos.wa.gov/help/support/_layouts/viewlsts.asp...) as we can see some of the behind the scenes operation like ticketing, bug reports, content, and other features and documentation. So from an "open & transparent government" aspect it's nice, but probably needs to be balanced more against how much information or access is given.