WASHINGTON DC – Fabricated political polling has forced its way into the spotlight during the midterm election period in the United States. Revelations that a small number of fraudulent firms have released fictitious results – some of which were picked up by news outlets and polling trackers – have raised concerns about how easily false information can acquire credibility.
Those datasets can be used to cast doubt on the electoral process. And when bad actors are unmasked, their existence can be leveraged to undermine voter confidence in election information overall. The latest example occurred this month, when Wedgewood Polls released a statement on social media admitting its statistics about a bevy of battleground states – like Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas and Maine – were fake.
Wedgewood described its work as “an experimental project” designed to highlight the “vulnerabilities, lack of oversight and overall low barrier to entry” in the US polling industry. “Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public’s trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverified, low-quality methodology”, the firm said in a statement posted to its social media account, which has now been deleted.
It justified its false data as a test to see how easy it would be for fabricated polling to gain traction among voters and the media. “The short answer: Far too easy,” Wedgewood said. But Wedgewood’s admission came after its surveys had already circulated through the political information ecosystem, reaching prominent media outlets like The New York Times. The incident was the second such scandal in the 2026 election cycle, following the exposure of another operation, Median Strategies, which acknowledged in August it had also faked results as a “short-term social experiment”.
In an increasingly polarised US political environment, the incidents have roiled a polling industry – and a public – struggling to adapt to an ever-changing information landscape. Wedgewood, which launched in June, published surveys covering competitive races across several states. Its results attracted attention from political campaigns, commentators and organisations that compile polling data. The New York Times said its polling tracker had listed 15 Wedgewood surveys between June and October. The newspaper subsequently removed them.
In the wake of the scandal, it explained that the firm had answered questions about its personnel, methodology and funding before its results were included. While the Times said Wedgewood’s surveys were not incorporated into the newspaper’s own presidential approval or national congressional polling averages, the case revealed a vulnerability in the process by which polling information becomes established as credible.
Polling aggregators help journalists and voters make sense of a crowded field of surveys by collecting results from multiple research organisations. Their value depends partly on their ability to distinguish reliable research from poorly conducted or fraudulent work. Wedgewood’s success in passing some of those checks suggests that transparency on paper is not necessarily proof that research has been conducted as claimed.
According to FiftyPlusOne, a polling and forecasting website that investigated the firm, inconsistencies in the raw data and the technical identifiers associated with survey responses helped raise suspicions about its authenticity. The investigation prompted Wedgewood to acknowledge that most of its results were fabricated.
Though Wedgewood has denied trying to mislead the public, some pollsters are not convinced, suggesting the group could be up to something more nefarious. “We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data,” said data journalist G Elliott Morris, who was involved in FiftyPlusOne’s probe. “They are trying to cover up for their fraud with the ‘we were doing a social experiment’ excuse”. (Aljazeera)
