Civics: Notes on Fraudulent Polls

Harry Crane & Koleman Strumpf:

Curiously, polls, the other leading forecaster of elections, haven’t received anything like this level of scrutiny. Yet unlike prediction markets, we now have two examples of fraudulent polls from the current election cycle.

Over the summer the pollster Median Strategies was found to be fabricating polls, most prominently overstating the chances of a far-left candidate in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. The firm said it was conducting a “short-term social experiment” to examine “how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Last week Wedgewood Polls admitted most of its polling numbers were also an “experiment.” This one had at least one documented effect in changing election outcomes. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary when Wedgewood’s fake numbers showed her lagging. This led donations to dry up and demoralized staffers. “It killed us,” she wrote on X. Abdul El-Sayed won the nomination and is in a tight race for the seat. Wedgewood’s phony poll may be one reason why.