Nate Silver accuses pollster of possible fraud [View All]

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/strategic-vision-polls-exhibit-unusual.html


Yesterday, I posed several pointed questions to David E. Johnson, the founder of Strategic Vision, LLC, an Atlanta-based PR firm which also occasionally releases political polls. One of the questions, in light of Strategic Vision LLC's repeated failure to disclose even basic details about its polling methodology, is whether the firm is in fact conducting polling at all, or rather, is creating fake but plausible-looking results in order to increase traffic and attention to its core business as a PR and literary firm.

I posed that question largely as a hypothetical yesterday. But today, I pose it much more literally. Certain statistical properties of the results reported by Strategic Vision, LLC suggest, perhaps strongly, the possibility of fraud, although they certainly do not prove it and further investigation will be required.

The specific evidence in question is as follows. I looked at all polling results reported by Strategic Vision LLC since the beginning of 2005; results from 2008 onward are available at their website; other polls were recovered through archive.org. This is a lot of data -- well over 100 polls, each of which asked an average of about 15-20 questions.

. . . .

I haven't really seen anyone approach polling data like this before, and I certainly haven't done so myself. So, we cannot rule out the possibility that there is some mathematical rationale for this that I haven't thought of. But it looks really, really bad. There is a substantial possibility -- far from a certainty -- that much of Strategic Vision's polling over the past several years has been forged.

I recognize the gravity of this claim. I've accused pollsters -- deservedly I think in most cases -- of all and sundry types of incompetence and bias. But that is all garden-variety stuff, as compared against the possibility that a prominent polling firm is making up numbers whole cloth.

I would emphasize, however, that at this stage, all of this represents circumstantial evidence. We are discussing a possibility. If we're keeping score, it's a possibility that I would never have thought to look into if Strategic Vision had been more professional about their disclosure standards. And if we're being frank, it's a possibility that might actually be a probability. But it's only that. A possibility. An hypothesis -- as yet unproven