America is Exceptional! Now Consequence Free Fake Polling

[Jimmy Higgins]

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The pollster had been releasing surveys since June, shifting from one midterm battleground to another: Michigan. Maine. Kansas.

On Tuesday night, after the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted the pollster, Wedgewood Polls, with questions about the authenticity of its surveys, the team behind the supposed data firm acknowledged that almost all of its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”

The get out of jail free card apparently is "social experiment" or "experimental project". Fraud apparently can be synonym'd away.

This likely puts Mississippi off the dark horse Democrat take states, even with the 4 pt lead, it was still a long shot among long shots.

FiftyPlusOne, a polling website run by former employees of FiveThirtyEight, wrote on Tuesday night that it had reached out to Wedgewood with a request for comment earlier that day. That website had essentially sought to replicate one of Wedgewood’s polls in Mississippi, which Wedgewood has said was conducted with an online survey platform called Pollfish, after it noticed inconsistencies in Wedgewood’s data. That exercise, FiftyPlusOne wrote, made it “clear that the red flags we had seen in the Wedgewood data were definitely still waving.”

The lesson here is simple, don't trust a polling company you haven't heard of. And don't expect anyone to be held accountable, because this type of fraud is exceptionally legal.

 

[Politesse]

Whether it is legal remains to be seen, but the point they say they are making is belied by the fact that they got caught. Not before real damage was done, but they had to work hard and waste a lot of real money to push their "experiment" in influencing Betfair results, and now they have been caught red-handed and vanished from the internet exactly like guilty criminals. The people who spot abberant polls and start asking questions can't work faster than the 24/7 news cycle, but they do work. Note that FiftyPlusOne became suspicious almost immediately, and opened a file.