Pollster admits to fabricating data for ‘social experiment’ to expose flaws of industry

A polling firm has admitted to using fabricated data in surveys that were picked up by national media outlets in the US, claiming the project was a “social experiment” designed to expose the lack of scrutiny over the sector.

Wedgewood Polls released a statement on Tuesday on social media, after the polling and election analysis site FiftyPlusOne reached out for comment on an investigation it had conducted into their surveys and data.

In its statement, Wedgewood Polls admitted to fabricating its numbers, and said the project was designed as a “wake-up call”, intended “to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry”.

“Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms,” the statement said. “The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.”

Publications that reproduced Wedgewood Polls’s fraudulent surveys included Newsweek, the Hill, Breitbart, the Daily Beast and the Washington Examiner, and those that included its results in their polling databases included the New York Times, Nate Silver, VoteHub and FiftyPlusOne.

After Wedgewood’s admission, the election results and analysis site Decision Desk HQ said it had removed 17 polls from its race-level polling lists and averages, and the New York Times said in an editor’s note that all of its polls had been removed from its poll tracking project.

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”.

In August, Straight Arrow News then looked into Wedgewood’s background, finding that its website, hosted on Google Sites, listed no employee names, phone number or location. Its website had been registered on 26 June, and its X account created that same month.

On 16 August, an Urban Milwaukee journalist referred to Wedgewood as “a shady outfit” after one of its polls regarding the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor showed Francesca Hong at 30% “at a time when legitimate polls had her with far less of the vote”.

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.

Then FiftyPlusOne researchers received a tip – after having previously received other tips about Wedgewood that lacked evidence – earlier in October suggesting that Wedgewood had been faking its data. They obtained Wedgewood’s raw data for its Mississippi Senate survey, their most recent survey, which the company said had been conducted using online survey platform Pollfish.

FiftyPlusOne said it identified discrepancies in the data and confronted Wedgewood with its findings. The firm then published its statement on X.

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.

McMorrow wrote on X: “Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in – for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down.”

She went on: “Trust is already at an all-time low. We don’t get out of this mess without rebuilding trust. And media – who loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster – needs to take a hard look at what’s legitimate and what’s not.”

The affair followed a similar story in August in which the Guardian tracked down a 21-year-old recent college graduate who was found to be behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California.

That site, Median Strategies, had abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling the week prior after questions from a Los Angeles Times reporter. In an unsigned statement, it similarly described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”