A firm that has published widely circulated midterm political polls has acknowledged that its numbers were “fabricated” and claimed they were part of an experiment that duped some media outlets.
Wedgewood Polls, the bogus firm, described itself in a press release Tuesday as an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.”
The group boasted that despite having no “real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and treated as a legitimate data source.”
They denied nefarious intentions, saying the project “was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public; it was designed as a wake-up call.”
Wedgewood published several widely circulated polls, mostly on Senate races. Some had surprising results, such as an Oct. 14 Mississippi Senate race survey purporting to show the Republican incumbent leading by just four points.
FiftyPlusOne, a polling aggregator, claimed credit on Tuesday for forcing Wedgewood to acknowledge the hoax.
The aggregator said Wedgewood provided a fraudulent methodology statement and described its leadership and funding sources. The aggregator said this helped Wedgewood appear legitimate and be included in the model.
“This was sufficient information for us to aggregate the surveys at the time,” said FiftyPlusOne....
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