Maybe. This would rock the polling industry and how it gets its results published if true. Think about it, groups pay for polls all the time and the media dutifully reports those results comparing them to other results. Those polls might even get aggregated into trend lines at places like Pollster.com.
Statistician Nate Silver of 538 has long had issues with polls from Strategic Vision because they wouldn’t release their methodology, which is pretty much standard within the industry, and now he’s found very possible evidence the company is purely creating polling results out of whole cloth.
Stats aren’t very sexy, and polling is, as they say, an inexact science, but this allegation is very serious and Silver wouldn’t put his budding punditry on the line if he weren’t pretty sure of it’s veracity.
From the second link:
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.
Like I said, very serious allegations. If you are interested in the gritty details, here’s a link to the original post Silver alluded to in the excerpt, and a follow-up post.
From the “follow-up post” link above:
Bottom line: It is highly unlikely, in my opinion, that the distribution of the results from the Strategic Vision polls are reflective of any sort of ordinary and organic, mathematical process.
That does not necessarily mean that they simply made these numbers up.