However, the seriousness of “Wedgewood Polls” had already been questioned a few months ago: a columnist for the “Washington Monthly” portal had already had doubts about “Wedgewood Polls” last July. Among other things, the article criticized the fact that the company had only appeared publicly a month earlier.
In his article, the columnist also referred to the portal’s most recent polls on the primary elections in Michigan. Democrat El-Sayed was on the rise there, which was also supported by a survey from “Wedgewood Polls”. However, a poll by the institute on a Republican primary in the state of Louisiana had previously proven to be “completely wrong,” it said.
No address, no phone number
The structure of the company had also previously raised questions. The “Straight Arrow News” portal reported on the institute in August. The report states that no information about employees, telephone numbers or even an address was provided on the institute’s website. In addition, the website was only registered on June 26th – one day after the portal was supposed to have published the questionable survey on Louisiana.
Wedgewood Polls has since deleted its entire online presence and social media accounts. An email from t-online came back saying that the address no longer existed.
According to media reports, the company had two employees named Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. While Sims is said to have been more on the Republican side, Prater was more likely to support the Democrats. They are said to have told the “Straight Arrow News” that they had been victims of online harassment in the past and that their private address had been published. Therefore, more extensive information was not provided on the website.
“Very disturbing”
In addition to the “Wedgewood Polls” incident, there was already a similar case in August. At that time, surveys from a company called “Median Strategies” were also exposed as fabricated. The institute conducted surveys for the states of Nevada, Wisconsin and California fake. The operators later also spoke of it being an “experiment”.
So far there is no evidence that the two cases are connected. Michael Traugott, a former fellow at the American Association for Public Opinion Research, believes the damage from the incidents is great. “It is very worrying that we have had two such cases in a very short period of time during election campaigns, which causes a lot of problems for serious opinion polls,” Traugott told Time magazine.
Well-known US election analyst Nate Silver said on Platform Although the company published a comparatively large number of false surveys in just a few months, overall it was relatively unknown.
