Last week the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls with questions about the authenticity of its surveys. In response, the team behind the supposed pollster acknowledged that its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”
The project had an impact on election campaigns, with polls it did since June on many races, “shifting from one midterm battleground to another,” the New York Times reported, including Michigan, Maine, Kansas and Wisconsin.
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The media has reported that Wedgewood began releasing polls in June. On July 7, a story by Urban Milwaukee raised questions about a Wedgewood poll on the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. Up to then, the most recent Marquette poll had shown Hong with 14% of the vote, and a more recent internal poll released by the campaign of Sara Rodriguez showed Hong at 22%. But the Wedgewood poll had Hong at a whopping 30%, which could “help convince Democrats who doubt her electability that she is running away with the race,” the story reported, noting that Wisconsin Republican Chairman Brian Schimming had said that for Republicans Hong would be the best opponent.
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But the Wedgewood “experiment” clearly sought to push Democratic voters in a way that would help Republican candidates. Just as it tried to elevate the candidacy of Francesca Hong, the most liberal candidate in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, it released a fake poll showing Mallory McMorrow, the moderate candidate in the Michigan primary for U.S. Senate, “plummeting into single digits,” as Time reported. “McMorrow said donations ‘dried up’ and she was ‘hounded’ with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the infamous’ Wedgewood poll numbers.”
Funny how the party that always screams the loudest about election fraud is the party that keeps getting caught (but somehow not really punished) committing election fraud.
Fake polls are not election fraud, although they certainly are a dirty trick.
Fake polls are definitely a “both sides” thing. A notorious example in the 2024 election was the Selzer poll, which was ludicrous when it was released and confirmed to be such during the actual election. 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental. Polls generally speaking have long been used to shape public opinion and policy more than they have to actually understand the public .
Nowadays both sides are also doing what they can to manipulate the elections via prediction markets.
The selzer poll was not a fake poll. It was an outlier. She was famously one of the best most reliable pollster in the country. Sometimes polls are just wrong just from pure bad luck and you still publish them if you trust your methodology.
> 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental.
Not a pollster, but Nate Silver publicly challenged someone on Twitter to a $100k bet over how red Florida would go. IIRC Silver was predicting 3-5% margin, Twitterer said minimum 8%. Trump won by 14%. Even Silver, who lived and breathed analyzing polls and their reliability, made a mistake of that magnitude with his own money on the line. Sometimes the votes don't line up with polling, and sometimes the professionals genuinely don't see it coming.
I think that that is more of an illustration that polls are always about a statistical likelihood and never about an absolute. With a 3-5% margin 14% is not as unlikely as you might think. (It's ~ 1:3).
You need a measure of variance to perform that kind of estimate. There's scenarios where 98% of results land within 3-5% of a value, and the 14% is extremely unlikely. And scenarios where the variance is high, and it's much more likely. (you can also be wrong about what you think the variance is)
Ann Selzer used a model that had little to no weighting in it and only used phone polls. This worked reasonably well in previous elections where the combination of chance and similar levels of voter enthusiasm.
It failed in 2024 when it didn't weight its model to handle differences in demographics vs the sampled population. She accounted for age, sex, and district - but not education, party identification, or past voting behavior. (The specifics of why the model failed is up for debate, but it was the same model that had been used for many years and was reasonably accurate).
From 2023, here's a description of her polling methodology:
But it's difficult, even I know where to look and a lot of the methodology statements get hidden or are inadequate to make that assumption. The main thing I'm going to tell you that distinguishes us from most other polling, not all, there's some very good polls out there that do what I do, which is we don't make assumptions about what that future electorate is going to look like. We let the data -- we try to get out of the way of the data showing us. So, you'll look and they'll say how they weighted the data, this that and the other, and then they include in that who the likely demographics of the 2024 caucus are likely to be. And I go, really? How do you know what that is likely to be? Or they're weighting it based on who they voted for in the 2020 election or other factors like that, or maybe they're only talking to people who have caucused before. And this approach I call polling backward, that if you're creating a model of the future, what are you going to base it on? You're going to base it on what happened in the past. And I know that things can change. So, I want to have my fingers off the data, my dirty fingers I try to keep them off the data, so it will reveal to me how that's going to go.
... And that approach failed with her 2024 poll. She weighted the overall population, but not the likely voter and it's possible that the approach was too strict.
But for everybody else we keep them on the phone to get age, sex, what county they live in. That is going to give us some geography so that we can weight all of those people, I think there were 1,100 and some in our final poll, to look like the state of Iowa because that we know. And then we extract from that those people who made our likely voter screen and interviewed them. So, if they are proportionately more women who pass that screen, they are going to show up here but they are weighted at the statewide level. It's a little geeky. But one of the things I've been thinking about is with caucuses we take you if you definitely or probably will participate and maybe our screen was too tight. I don't know, there's no way to undo it and sort of check, well what would the probably people have said, because we very politely terminated the people who just said they would probably vote. But that has been our system since 2008.
Yes, that’s her public defense. Did she publish the raw data and methodology showing this? Or are these unprovable statements that cover for her reputation?
I mean this defense is effectively saying that polls are actually worthless and should be ignored anyway - that’s what “the best polling methodology we have can sometimes be off by 15 points” would actually mean.
If you really believe “good” pollsters don’t do this, you should question how the Harris campaign’s internal polling outperformed them. How did a political campaign correctly predict with polling all along that she was behind Trump when public polling consistently showed her ahead until tightening immediately before? Public polling, again, is generally more of a tool to shape opinion than it is to reflect reality. Private campaign polling that’s limited to leadership only is much more likely to be accurate since they actually want the truth.
What it's actually saying is that polling is useful in the aggregate and useless in the individual. One can have a 66% hit rate in the aggregate, well above flipping a coin, and still not be able to predict the future for any individual outcome. Unfortunately, 90% of people are statistically illiterate, so we get takes like "getting a single poll wrong can only be the outcome of a malicious attempt to deceive the public".
Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.
And there are biases with internal polling. I'm more likely to answer a poll by (A) whom I'm more likely to vote for than by (B) where I may be concerned that they're trying to collect my data for nefarious uses.
If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.
The people that got fucked over by Wedgewood were the party-preferred candidates. Wedgewood artificially inflated the polling of progressive candidates that were running against the party to a degree.
On top of that it's not election fraud, though it is potentially some kind of fraud if they were involved in betting markets.
It is sometimes difficult to find publicly released polling for many different races, especially the down ballot ones. Other polling is done but kept internally and not released for free.
If a fake polling company could be set up to release polls for underreported races that are being traded on prediction markets then you could make a good bit of money by timing your trades to the release of your fake poll.
The goal is not just to influence the prediction markets to game a profit, it would also be to hope that once the polls influence the prediction markets, that it will feed back into the voters to actually influence the result.
As long as we're introspecting, and being on the watch for influence campaigns, it may be instructive to scan the article for the use of `/(center[ -])?(left|right)([ -](wing|leaning))?/` designations.
Hard to say what the takeaway or lesson is here, other than having trustworthy professionals disseminating unbiased information is a public good and losing it creates paranoia and social distrust everywhere.
We didn't "lose" it, we never had it. It's extremely difficult to rigorously analyze and present data. Even the smartest professionals are mostly consensus machines outside maybe a very niche expertise that they've spent decades on. That is before we get to the institutional interests of the places where these professionals work.
There is a lot of crap being produced to sway the election from all sides of the political spectrum.
A more serious question of how and why an organization such as the NYTimes (and others of similar stature) would so easily and quickly incorporate polling data from a brand new polling company into its election data and articles and be so easily fooled.
And, when this was uncovered, they did not do much more than what seemed the minimal amount to CYA, quietly backing out the data and issuing an editors note that few people would find.
They do not seem that interested in protecting their reputation, or maybe they don't believe their readers care.
Trump has been manipulating the media, attacking the electoral process, lying, using federal resources to persecute political rivals... "all sides" seems unfair.
> "Right-Wing Influencers Amplify the Controversy"
Why are we both-sidesing this and blaming the poll aggregators when they are the ones that successfully rooted out the fake poll data?
I think a big problem is that, as a poll aggregator, the more you pick and choose which polls are allowed to be aggregated, the more risk there is that you are inserting bias into the result through selective exclusion. Erring on the side of broadly accepting poll data means less room for bias. But they do talk about the need to raise their standards due to the increasing ease of producing fake data in this podcast with FiftyPlusOne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neuot3aMkrY
Seems like the kind of thing someone should go to jail for. You can't just run a "social experiment" by committing fraud and lying to people, and that's assuming this isn't just an excuse someone came up with once they knew they would be caught.
It isn’t necessarily a crime to lie or do a hoax, and a fake poll by itself is probably well within the lines of free speech. The fraud question comes into it for two possible cases:
1) someone might have paid them to do a real poll and they faked it, which is just straightforward fraud with a clear victim.
2) (the fun one) they might have done it to manipulate political prediction markets, which gets into securities fraud questions.
The correctness of that being... well, a whole 'nother debate. Putting that aside for the moment, CFTC has previously gone after people for fraud.
If we assume gambling about the outcome of an election is "futures trading", then fraudulent election polls are the same kind of criminal activity as someone putting out fraudulent corn-harvest reports when trading corn futures.
i dont know if this would really count as fraud in that case either - its not like they lied about the results of the primary or anything, just influenced it by convincing people to vote a certain way or drop out.
i think this is more like putting out fake weather reports than fake corn harvest reports.
Generating an AI hallucination of "called 278 likely voters in the district and it resulted in..." is just as fake as making up the data yourself.
AI hallucination could be a way to generate fake polling data, but that doesn't matter given that the intent is to generate fake polling data. It could have been done with a bag of dice just as easily.
Please release more fake polls. Polling is almost always an attempt to influence elections, which is why they press release them. The results are race-based astrology. There's little reason to believe that fake polls will be statistically less accurate than real ones. People pretend like the prediction markets are news, and they're just a group of degenerate gamblers with money to burn who are summarizing what they're reading on twitter.
It is insane that Democratic candidates are dropping out of races as a result of reading fake polls on twitter. If their candidacy could be destroyed by that, it shouldn't have been started in the first place. Also, typical authoritarian solution to try to figure out how to eliminate or prosecute fake polls, rather than to end the substitution of triangulation for belief. It would be wonderful if someone could believe in something other than winning. You might win; people are starved for candidates who believe in something other than personal enrichment.
You can't libel the general public. I can lie about whatever poll I want, as long as I'm not selling you anything (which would be fraud.) Politicians can't be prosecuted for the promises they made during the campaign that they immediately abandoned after being elected, but I, a random citizen, am held to a higher standard about my pronouncements of the opinions of the randomly chosen and race-weighted public? Get out of here...
i think its more of a face saving lie that mcmorrow dropped out over the twitter poll.
she ruined her campaign by trying to make it about hasan piker, who wasnt running, and a good portion of the people she needed as supporters kinda like piker on at least a surface check of what he has to say.
i think more what happened is all her donors were already out, and they just pointed at that poll. its not like it was a unique poll.
pointing at the fake poll gets her(and her consultants) some cover for having made bad campaign choices
Normally I wouldn't say something that lightheaded but.. I think this is what psyops look like. I'm not claiming it is one. But it sure sounds like one.
That was the first thing that I thought of and it does make way more sense than a few people wanting to make a name for themselves as an actual Polling org. I don’t see the incentive in producing fake polling unless there are ulterior motives
