NEW YORK: Locked in a competitive re-election race, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared on social media last week that a new poll was proof her campaign was “gaining momentum.” Just a few days later, the truth came to light: the survey was fabricated. The California results were among at least three “polls” in three states published online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the supposed results were false.Before shutting down its website this week, the company wrote that it “was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.” The publication does not explain who was behind the “experiment” or for what purpose.The Guardian reported Thursday that a 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind the website. “I wanted to see if fake surveys could really penetrate the ecosystem so easily,” Rahil Prakash told The Guardian when we contacted him by phone. “And it turned out I could.”The trajectory of the California survey offers a warning about the dangers of relying on unresearched surveys. While high-quality independent surveys still exist, they appear amid a host of other surveys produced by outside groups, campaigns or super PACs or that use undisclosed or questionable methodologies. It can be difficult to make sense of the findings, and as the latest episode shows, even campaigns can end up falling for falsified data.“This is much bigger than a fake poll,” said Chris Wilson, a veteran Republican pollster who now runs the public opinion firm EyesOver. “It’s never been easier to make made-up numbers look legitimate, and campaigns and outside groups have every incentive to amplify anything favorable before anyone verifies it.”Median Strategies’ fake polls claimed to gauge support in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, the Nevada gubernatorial race, and the Los Angeles mayoral race. The Los Angeles poll, which purported to show Bass, an incumbent Democrat, leading Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a progressive Democrat, by about 12 percentage points in the mayoral race, was shared by Bass’s campaign on social media and covered by the California Post before it was revealed to be fake.Bass’s campaign has since deleted its social media post promoting the poll, but defended itself by saying it “was reported by multiple media outlets.” “Any bad faith attempt to influence the election must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack.The New York Times and FiftyPlusOne noted that the surveys were published without basic information needed for the investigation, such as who ran the company.“When the poll was released, basic information about how it was conducted and who was behind it was missing,” Will Davis, director of Election Data Analysis at the New York Times, wrote in an email to the AP. “Releasing this type of information is standard practice for pollsters, and since that information was not provided, we did not include it.”Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, also thought the Wisconsin poll’s methodological statement was missing key details, including the source of the voter file the company claimed to have used. “There is a universe in which they could have found plausible answers to my questions,” he said. “This is an industry built on trust. I have to trust that people are answering my questions in good faith.” While confessions of falsified election data are rare, they are not without precedent. In 2010, for example, the left-wing blog Daily Kos said that polls for its website, conducted by a company called Research 2000, were fraudulent.
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