r/news • u/Radical_Redditor • 3h ago
Pollster admits to fabricating data for ‘social experiment’ to expose flaws of industry | US news
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/21/polling-fabricated-data-social-experiment322
u/Unlucky-Internet2495 3h ago
“Social experiment” in this instance = fraud. They fraudulently created polling data. Ought to be illegal imo if it isn’t already.
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u/vpi6 2h ago
There’s a good chance the guys behind this are election gamblers on Kaishi
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u/JA14732 1h ago
Or right-wing lunatics trying to erode confidence in polling and get people to not vote.
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u/vfdfnfgmfvsege 28m ago
When they were found out to be fraudulent they responded with "Fuck you". It wasn't a social experiment, they did it intentionally for some rat fucking reason.
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u/DisruptiveLove 3h ago
They are saving face after they got caught by fivethirtyeight. I wonder if it’s possible for them to get sued for damages because what they did was fraud and it did cause some candidates to drop out. It probably won’t happen but I wouldn’t be surprised.
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u/Kundrew1 13m ago
It’s a two person company created a few months. There is nothing to sue for. They’d just close the company
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u/BlindWillieJohnson 3h ago edited 3h ago
A more accurate title would be “Polling business admits to fraud after collecting contributions for its efforts”, because that’s what happened
At any rate, they didn’t expose any flaw in the polling industry which is a professional one done by serious data scientists. That their results were reported uncritically isn’t the fault of pollsters; it’s a flaw in the industry of political punditry. And we hardly needed them to tell us that was a problem.
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u/HLOFRND 3h ago
I haven’t read the article so maybe I’m 100% off base but my knee jerk reaction is that this is a narrative someone is planting so they can claim all the polls were wrong and the election was stolen again.
I’m sure I’m wrong, but these liars are always lying so….
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u/shadowndacorner 2h ago
You should read the article in this case. It got a dem harassed into dropping out of the race because her supporters thought her support evaporated. This unfortunately had tangible negative repercussions.
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u/onarainyafternoon 2h ago edited 2h ago
Yep.
> Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster at a different firm, told Straight Arrow News that he had communicated with someone at Wedgewood after he raised a question about them on X. Carlson said the person told him the two-person firm includes one progressive and one conservative. They declined to reveal their identities or participate in a video call, claiming that one of the two people at Wedgewood had previously experienced doxing and online harassment.
> Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, who dropped out of a contentious US Senate primary campaign on 5 July, said that Wedgewood’s numbers indicated that her support had plunged in the weeks prior. As a result, her donations dried up, volunteers were left “devastated”, and reporters “hounded” her with calls to drop out of the race, she said.
They also got wildly wrong a poll for a Republican candidate, so I don’t even think this was specifically targeting Dems, and more-so just straight up fraud.
> Wedgewood Polls first came on the polling scene in June, billing itself as an election survey firm that conducted independent political research. Within weeks, on 10 July, a Washington Monthly columnist noted that its first poll of the Louisiana Republican primary runoff had been “wildly wrong”.
I do not buy their explanation that it was a “social experiment”. I think they were just grifting.
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u/BlindWillieJohnson 2h ago
Honestly McMarrow wasn’t winning that thing in any case. But she definitely has grounds to sue them
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u/PinkNGreenFluoride 2h ago edited 2h ago
Yep. She was probably going to lose, but she deserved the chance to do so legitimately and fairly, and, hey, maybe there's a chance she could have turned it around with the time still left until that primary. We'll never know, and neither will she, because these grifting fraudsters killed her campaign to make themselves a buck. She should pursue whatever legal recourse she can here.
The voters deserved a fair race and El-Sayed deserved an untainted win, too. He had nothing to do with this, but it must still feel pretty crappy. And some folks will blame him, anyway.
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u/returnofthechief 3h ago
I mean, we’ve seen how accurate the polls have been the past couple elections spanning over 10 years now. Must have been this guy the entire time
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u/BlindWillieJohnson 2h ago edited 2h ago
This is stupid. Elections are difficult things to predict, but “polls are always wrong” is one of those takes that demonstrates a really serious misunderstanding of both the the actual results relative to the polls, and how polling even works in the first place.
For the record, midterm polling is generally excellent, and the polling was generally accurate in 2018, 2020 and 2022. But Trump does funky things to turnout, which makes likely voter models miss. And while that has reduced their accuracy in the elections he’s run in, we’re still talking about misses of 3-4 points rather than wildly inaccurate results that are just fake. That’s within the margin of error, so named because it’s supposed to account for exactly this. Polls don’t exist to predict “X candidate will win/lose”, but the likely vote share each candidate will have within a margin of 4% or so. And in a close race (which both of his victories were) a miss of 2-4 points can be the difference-maker in several close states at once. And in both 2016 and 2024, the popular vote AND the deciding swing states were all decided by less than 2.5%
What you’re likely poking fun at, that Harris and Clinton both enjoyed slim but shrinking leads by Election Day, and everyone assumed that a 25-40% chance was tantamount to a 0% one, is, again, a problem of punditry, not of polling as a scientific exercise
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u/GalvanizedParabola 3h ago
This wasn't a social experiment, it was fraud. They only put out that statement because they got caught. They would have been perfectly happy to continue the fraud if they didn't get caught.
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u/biological_assembly 3h ago
That was a deliberate test of a misinformation tactic that I'm sure is going to be used in the following days
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u/iPinch89 3h ago
Sounds like their incredible lack of accuracy led to additional scrutiny. Did their "experiment" discover a vulnerability? It seems like the system worked - a new polster shows up, you assume they arent fraudulent, if their data seems to disagree with everyone else, you look deeper. In this case, they found fraud.
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u/MikeOKurias 3h ago
In a world without ethics who cares about deliberate voter manipulation by shadow entities.
Republicans are a plague on humanity
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u/Tyhgujgt 3h ago
Those guys fucked up Michigan primary and may have got El Sayed elected.
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u/darshan666 3h ago
We can hope. But I just read that this guy’s polls are creating w win for the right so I guess we’ll see.
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u/Tyhgujgt 3h ago
I mean it's bad either way. Just the fact that El Sayed is alright doesnt make fuckery less harmful. We need institutions we can trust
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u/RobutNotRobot 1h ago
Are you the world's dumbest bot?
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u/darshan666 15m ago
No. There are waaaay dumber bots. But according to npr this morning, whatever shenanigans were happening with the polling droped Sayed’s lead by 0.6. So whatever is benefiting Mike Rodgers. That’s not a win for the right? I mean Rodger’s is still going to loose because he sucks and people want healthcare but I’d prefer a wider margin.
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u/Marduq 3h ago
Seems like a jailable offense, no?
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u/allllusernamestaken 58m ago
under what offense? they broke no law.
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u/MommyLovesPot8toes 48m ago
Fraud. They committed fraud. They misrepresented themselves and received financial gain and caused actual harm. That's called fraud.
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u/Kundrew1 39m ago
The issue here is that they did not receive financial gain. There is no criminal fraud case here. They published their poll, and other news orgs published it as well. The news orgs didn't pay them for that data for the poll results.
A candidate could potentially have a civil fraud case against the company but the company would close up shop and say they are bankrupt. The company was just created for this purpose.
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u/Marduq 24m ago
There are claims they took donations to make their poll. If true they took money under false pretenses.
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u/posthuman04 17m ago
An intentionally fraudulent poll? Was actually conducted? With donated money? Are you sure?
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u/MommyLovesPot8toes 5m ago
They solicited and took donations for crowd-funded surveys. They say they used those funds for a real survey, but I suspect they'll be asked to state that again under oath.
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u/Marduq 27m ago
They took donations supposedly so there could be something in respect to that.
I asked Claude and it said:
Most plausible: fraud tied to the donations. Reporting says Wedgewood collected donations to finance its supposedly legitimate surveys, and FiftyPlusOne says the raw data Wedgewood shared on Oct. 15 was confirmed to be fraudulent. Investigators also reportedly compared the respondent IDs in one Senate poll against real records from Pollfish, the platform Wedgewood claimed to use, and found they didn’t match. If donors paid for polls that were never actually conducted, that is the classic setup for wire fraud (a scheme to get money through false pretenses using the internet). State attorneys general could also pursue it under consumer-protection or charitable-solicitation laws. Calling it a “social experiment” after the fact doesn’t erase fraud if donors were deceived when they gave. Wedgewood Admits Fabricating Polls, Many Boosting Dems in GOP States - Hungarian Conservative +2
Possible but weaker: election-related falsity laws. Some states criminalize knowingly publishing false information intended to influence an election. Wedgewood’s fake polls covered Senate races including Mississippi, Kansas, Texas and Michigan. It’s unclear whether those laws reach a fabricated poll, and they face First Amendment challenges. One outlet reports the numbers may have caused a Senate primary candidate to drop out, which would strengthen an argument about real-world impact, but I haven’t seen that independently confirmed. redstate
Speculative: campaign finance. If Wedgewood raised money for political purposes, or took money from or coordinated with a campaign or committee, registration and disclosure rules could come into play. Nothing reported so far shows that.
Civil exposure. Donors who were misled could sue for fraud, and candidates or campaigns harmed by fake numbers might try claims like defamation, though proving damages from a poll is hard.
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u/WinCrazy4411 3h ago
They were caught. So going with the whole "no one is vetting pollsters; they can lie and no one will spot it" claim seems pretty hard to justify.
They made up data. They got caught. Then they said "we were doing it on purpose, because ... social experiment ..."
Realistically, if they were competent they would likely have gotten away with it, or it would have taken years to catch, as happens once every few years with social science studies. The system is based on trust. Vetting will look at methodology, and is very good at analyzing methodology, but there's a basic trust in the industry that folks are serious researchers and aren't just making shit up. It's only when someone else tries to reproduce a controversial result (and can't reproduce it) that the lie is exposed. So, even if they were telling the truth (they're not), their fraud hurts polling much more than it exposes anything meaningful about polling.
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u/misfitofscience76 2h ago
They were trying to play the Kalshi type prediction markets by swaying “results”
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u/ProfessionalCraft983 1h ago
If that were the actual reason they would have disclosed it before getting caught by 538, not after. They are just fraudsters that got caught, nothing more.
The fact that they got caught actually proves the opposite of what they claim they were trying to “prove”.
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u/targetsinmegadeaths 1h ago
Funny that this is coming out now, right when the DOJ is also making claims of fake polls, right before an election. Pretty funny.
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u/RobutNotRobot 1h ago
So the polling firm was a fraud and other pollsters figured it out and went public. Now it's the whole 'it was a prank, bro' framing.
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u/che-che-chester 3h ago
I'm not defending this company but it is shocking how low the bar was for major publications to accept their polling data. The company only started in June and the article says there had been multiple concerns about their data but nobody dug deeper? One person did reach out, got them on the phone and they refused to identity themselves. WTF? You're publishing data from an anonymous source?
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u/AdjNounNumbers 2h ago
It makes sense once you realize that the major publications have a vested interest in getting clicks at all costs. We didn't need a social experiment to know that media outlets owned by the wealthy don't have journalistic integrity. Speaking of integrity, calling this a social experiment is their way of trying to get out of being held accountable for the fraud they were doing. This wasn't a social experiment that met any experimental standards. Where's their hypothesis? What data did they collect? What was their control?
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u/wanderingpeddlar 3h ago
The artical was posted today but this is old news. People were saying no kidding when this first came out. The hard part will be doing anything about it.
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u/Mrs_SmithG2W 2h ago
That’s one way to make sure no one takes you seriously again and implode your integrity, reputation and business in one go. It’s almost impressively stupid.
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u/JohnnyGFX 2h ago
I don't think that would stand up in court if they were to be charged with fraud.
However... this isn't the 'fraud' the current administration is looking for and Trump is probably readying his pardon pen right this moment.
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u/imprezv 3h ago
That's also why I do my job poorly. To expose the vulnerability of my industry. Not at all because I'm lazy