A supposed upstart polling company has now revealed their entire operation was fake, and are claiming they did it all as a social experiment — but some election observers aren't buying.
On Tuesday evening, the account for Wedgewood Polls, an outlet that has purported to release surveys on key races across the country, revealed all of their numbers were just made up.
"Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public's trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverified, low-quality methodology," stated the account. "We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary? The short answer: Far too easy."
"Despite having no history, formal credentials, or 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 repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source," said the statement. "Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms-including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS NOW. The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation."
Ultimately, said the statement, only one of their polls was actually real: a survey conducted in Nebraska, which they said created a "real baseline to compare against synthetic data."
Not everyone fully bought the explanation that Wedgewood was honestly faking data to test social trust, however — and Cooper Burton, a data scientist with FiftyPlusOne, had a darker accusation: they're only coming clean now because they were about to get exposed.
"This is incredibly misleading. @50plus1news was planning to publish an investigation into Wedgewood's polls tomorrow morning, and reached out to them this morning for comment. This is just an attempt to save face after they realized we caught them," said Burton. He included a link to the investigation, which has been released ahead of schedule in reaction to Wedgewood going public, and said, among other things, that Wedgewood's claim polling aggregators did no vetting were false; they were initially accepted into the data because they had legitimately experienced pollsters running the operation.
This is not the first time this year a fake polling firm has been exposed. Median Strategies, another such "pollster," briefly put out information on races like the Los Angeles mayoral election, before stating their entire operation was an experiment in the same way Wedgewood is now claiming.