How FiftyPlusOne busted a fake pollster

What a week we've had.

I think the best thing to do is to just give the lay of the land for people, which I'll just do briefly and then invite in the conversation about what's going on.

So first, if you are a Strength in Numbers podcast listener, I think some context is in order.

If you don't read the website, the Strength in Numbers website normally, you may not know.

We have a sister site, 50 Plus One, that does data aggregation, polling aggregation, and election forecasting.

Part of that is obviously that we have a set of standards.

Mary has been on this show previously to talk about our standards.

The last time there was a documented case of data fabrication, that time, I believe, Mary, this was after the Median Strategies incident, right?

Yeah, and the Public

Sentiment Institute.

And the Public Sentiment Institute, a couple...

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, that was August, I think.

And those standards we use, I think we've got to change.

We talked about that a little bit this week to be a little more stringent because of how bad the data fabrication problem seems to be coming.

And I think we can just take our two cases this week, case by case.

Mary, I'm putting you on the spot here.

Do you want to give like a high level overview? of what we found with the Wedgwood Polls account?

Sure.

So this was a piece that we published on Tuesday about an alleged polling firm called Wedgwood Polls.

We had received some information from sources with evidence that they had been fabricating data.

So we set out to try to prove that.

And the way we settled on trying to prove that they fabricated data was to just try to replicate one of their surveys and see what happened.

So we built an identical survey or as close to identical as we could.

And we found a number of differences in the metadata that we got back from the company we used to field the survey that indicated that their poll couldn't have been produced using that platform.

We reached out to them for comment before we were able to publish the story.