Is it election interference or free speech? Another instance of a firm being busted for posting fake polls. Yet a five-minute Google search seems enough to expose these guys. If they have no social media footprint, that may be your first red flag. We’ve had multiple instances of polling firms admitting their surveys are trash, part of an ongoing social experiment to meddle with this industry, which has severely degraded in quality since the 2016 election. 

In Wisconsin, a firm shut down after admitting it had pushed a fake survey that put leftist Francesca Hong at least 20 points ahead in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. She lost by a razor-thin margin. Recently, Wedgewood said its polls were fake. Both said they were conducting social experiments. Now, SoCal Strategies is another firm that might be dabbling in this funny business:

I know he’s not a favorite on either side, but Nate Silver had a good explainer about the rise of fake polls and the vetting. It’s a real problem. For now, we can't do much since we’re so close to Election Day, but these fake polls have impacted races, with some candidates losing fundraising capacity and seeing their volunteer pool dry up. 

My opinion is that Wedgewood’s explanation is bullshit, a pathetic attempt to get ahead of the story after FiftyPlusOne was set to publish a story exposing the fraud. Whether some sort of crime was committed was unclear — Wedgewood allegedly collected crowdfunded money for a poll that may or may not have ever been conducted.1 FiftyPlusOne reports that Wedgewood identified Jack Sims and Andrew Prater as the people behind the firm. Whoever was responsible for fabricating the data probably shouldn't be trusted with anything election- or poll-related again.

[…]

One thing that’s a bit unusual is that Wedgewood “polled” several races where there was little or no publicly-available polling at the time. At Silver Bulletin, we turn on the average for a race once there are three distinct polls from at least two distinct polling firms. Four races where Wedgewood issued a “poll” did not meet that distinction. As far as I can tell, in fact, Wedgewood was the first firm of any kind to “poll” Troy Jackson’s race against Susan Collins in Maine as Graham Platner was preparing to drop out; they had Jackson ahead by 5 points.

In Michigan, meanwhile, Wedgewood was relatively early to “poll” Abdul El-Sayed’s race against Mike Rogers, showing him ahead by 5 points, better than the average3 which had AES ahead by 0.4 points instead. A Democratic candidate who dropped out, Mallory McMorrow, has alleged that Wedgewood’s “polls” hurt donor and voter confidence in her campaign.

[…]

How did the Wedgewood data enter our model in the first place?

The literal answer is that we take our polling data from The New York Times, subject occasionally to some manual additions and overrides. This has several advantages. The NYT feed is fast, comprehensive, and staffed by highly skilled professionals. And contrary to what the Wedgewood fraudsters have alleged, the Times does a lot of vetting. (The NYT didn’t include polls from another fake polling firm, Median Strategies, for instance.) In addition, the NYT feed is fairly explicitly modeled on the old FiveThirtyEight database schema and their criteria for poll inclusion, which I helped to design. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to recreate their efforts when they’re basically already doing the work in basically the same way that we’d do it.

[…]

Of course, someone willing to fake a poll may also be willing to fake answers in response to a vetting process. And this is probably getting easier because of AI (although AI can plausibly also help with fraud detection). Ultimately, thanks to the smart work of FiftyPlusOne, this particular scam was caught, however.

No vetting process is going to bat 1.000, however. What’s wrong with taking an incredibly strict policy? Well, if you were a frequent flier after September 11, you probably know. Vigorous screening can waste time for the vast majority of people doing nothing wrong. And overly strict screening can produce a lot of false positives and contribute to racial or other sorts of profiling.

Is it election interference? Is this free speech? Is it fraud? Everyone seems to have the same reason after getting busted. Maybe it warrants a DOJ review? 

All I know is that many so-called conspiracy theories are proving correct. 

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