Jess Bidgood at NYT:
The pollster had been releasing surveys since June, shifting from one midterm battleground to another: Michigan. Maine. Kansas.
On Tuesday night, after the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted the pollster, Wedgewood Polls, with questions about the authenticity of its surveys, the team behind the supposed data firm acknowledged that almost all of its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”
The fake polls were highlighted by well-known polling aggregators, including on the pages The New York Times uses to track surveys published by outside pollsters in key midterm races. The Times removed those polls Tuesday night and published an editors’ note that said it had included the Wedgewood polls — 15 in all — after the pollster answered a series of detailed questions from The Times about the pollsters’ identities, methods and funding.
It was the second time this year that fake polls have become news in the political world, underscoring the risks of misleading or false polling in an era of little-known data firms, hard-to-reach voters and suddenly ubiquitous prediction markets. It comes amid broader scrutiny of the way candidates have increasingly sought to use — or create — unreliable polling to serve their purposes, as well as larger questions over whether traditional polling can be trusted after high-profile misses
