Polling firm caught tampering with data for far-right candidate

Yet another polling controversy has rocked the political world, as a firm that spent months tracking the Florida GOP gubernatorial primary admitted to effectively fabricating the numbers in favor of far-right candidate James Fishback.

The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI) stated in a new release that they encountered "a suspected data-quality issue in the text panel" and tried to correct it by essentially giving respondents who had expressed support for Lt. Gov. Jay Collins to Fishback instead.

Fishback, a hedge fund manager who repeatedly made headlines for his racist outbursts, routinely was presented as competitive with Trump-endorsed nominee Byron Donalds in TPSI surveys. Ultimately, he took less than 11 percent of the vote in this week's election.

"Jay Collins was polling in the twenties in our data," said the release. "That did not align with our read of the race, and we concluded it might reflect a data-quality problem specific to our text-message panel. Acting on that conclusion, we identified respondents who selected Collins but whose broader profile aligned with a competing coalition, and leaned those respondents toward James Fishback."

In other words, VoteHub data scientist Ryan McComb noted, "it took respondents who had already picked Jay Collins and switched them to James Fishback."

Austin Park, cofounder and head of research at VoteHub, called the revelation "disappointing," and noted, "TPSI has been excluded in VoteHub averages for several months already."

This is the second such admission of faked data from a polling firm this month. Earlier this week, an upstart firm called Median Strategies that released polls of the Michigan Democratic Senate primary and the Los Angeles mayoral election admitted that the results of those polls were made up out of whole cloth as a "social experiment," triggering uproar from political experts.