A manufactured polling trend enters the mainstream
A US polling firm has admitted inventing survey results that were subsequently published by several national news outlets and fed into widely used election-tracking systems. Wedgewood Polls said the project was a “social experiment” designed to test how easily unverified political data could move from an obscure website into mainstream coverage and polling averages.
The confession followed an investigation by the election data site FiftyPlusOne, which obtained Wedgewood’s underlying survey information, identified inconsistencies and confronted the firm. Wedgewood then published a statement on X on Tuesday, 20 October, acknowledging that its numbers had been fabricated.
Newsweek, The Hill, Breitbart, The Daily Beast and The Washington Examiner were among the publications that reproduced the false surveys. Results also appeared in polling databases operated by The New York Times, Nate Silver, VoteHub and FiftyPlusOne, according to the admission.
Wedgewood described the exercise as a “wake-up call” intended to reveal “the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry”. The firm argued that its invented figures received “instant credibility across national media platforms”, demonstrating what it called “a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation”.
Once the deception became public, Decision Desk HQ removed 17 Wedgewood polls from its race-level lists and averages. The New York Times subsequently removed all of the firm’s polls from its tracking project.
Warnings were present before the admission
Wedgewood entered the polling market in June, presenting itself as an independent company conducting political research. Its first reported survey, covering the Republican primary runoff in Louisiana, was immediately questioned. On 10 July, a Washington Monthly columnist described the result as “wildly wrong”.
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