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Math Indicates Pollster Is Forging Results
An anonymous reader writes "Nate Silver suggests the political pollster Strategic Vision is 'cooking the books. And whoever is doing so is doing a pretty sloppy job.' Silver crunched five years worth of their polling data, and found their reported results followed a suspicious pattern which traditionally suggests fraud. The five-year distribution of the numbers 'is not random. It's not close to random.' The polling firm had already been reprimanded by the American Association for Public Opinion Research for failing to disclose their methodology, though the firm argues they did comply with the organization's request. Their response to Silver's accusation? 'We have a call in to our attorney on this and fully intend to take action that will vindicate us.'"
a. you can't post
b. if you do manage to post, post goes to wrong topic!
Anyway, back to the topic of Windows 98 being released today. I wonder if the Clinton Administration will continue with the anti trust investigations into M$.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
In other words, do they do stuff that actually matters?
In a word, yes. Nate Silver manages the blog FiveThirtyEight and is well-known as a statistical analyst from the 2008 US election (among other things). Strategic Vision has released quite a few polls. In Silver's words,
So yes, this is pretty big news, should it turn out that Strategic Vision's behavior is in fact illicit. They're influential enough that news agencies may pick up their polling results. This is bad enough, but when you factor in the fact that polling results can be very effective propaganda in something like a presidential race, fraudulent polling can have significant consequences.
Nope, you're looking at the webpage of a different company! See Nate's previous article:
Strategic Vision is a Republican pollster. Meaning when a Republican politician wants a poll about a particular set of data they give Strategic Vision some money and they do a poll. This can be for either internal polling to give them and idea how the "battle" is going or for general consumption. And yes Strategic Vision is big enough to matter, but they are just the tip of the iceberg how misleading "R" pollsters
In general there are some Republican some Independent and some Democrat pollsters however all of their results are supposed to be scientific the idea is dose a poll for internal consumption really help if tells you that you are going to win easily on election day only to have to be a landslide against you?The answer is no.
The reason why this is dangerous is multi fold. 1) Due to the supposed scientific nature it has been used to make public policy decisions 2) It can influence peoples opinions. 3) It can influence a senator's or some other politicians choices while they are in power.
Here is a perfect example of this. A certain Republican senator from Maine is considering if she should support a public option, so she wants to see what the citizens of her state think about the topic. She hires Strategic Vision to do a poll for her. Strategic Vision comes back and says 60% of your state's citizens are against it. She gose "Wow I guess im not supporting that bill" In reality its 60% the other way. From this the senator decides to not support the bill and it dose not pass.
I will be as blunt as possible. I am accusing Rasmussen, Strategic Vision and other Republican pollsters of deliberately lying to the American people in order to alter the public debate. If you follow the math they have been consistently off for years. If you want to just look at the last election cycle Rasmussen etc all had the results a lot tighter than the results on election day. This could just be poor polling on their part but I will offer exhibit B
Since health care reform has been a topic in the news the difference between the several Republican pollsters and "everyone else" has been steadily growing. I firmly believe that the insurance industry has been paying these pollsters to lower their numbers for the democrats to push them to drop health care reform.
Yes the Democrats poll numbers have been sliding somewhat across the board. However if you look at the data from the Republican sources. They have the numbers significantly different than those of the "Independent and Democratic" pollsters.
Over all I want to say this "dishonest polling" helps no one. It may help push a certain agenda temporarily but It can also cause those who support it to loose elections..... Look at the results from 2008 the REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BEING MISLEAD BY ITS OWN POLLSTERS AND IT IS COSTING THEM ELECTIONS
They are a partisan, Republican-oriented polling company. They have gotten into trouble in the recent past for their questionable results.
First, the example he gives where he looks at polls from ALL sources is an example of a plausible distribution of real results because, assuming the majority of pollsters are not cooking their data, the data should be dominated by randomness. He then looks at this particular pollster and finds a much greater disparity in trailing digit frequency. The question is, is it significant, or just chance?
Given the numbers, it's not particularly hard to figure out. You can calculate the likelihood of any particular result given a theoretical distribution using a G test of goodness of fit. Technically for numbers this small you could use an exact test but I don't know of a web version and I'm too lazy to write one up. But here's a description of, and an excel spreadsheet that performs, the G test of goodness of fit: http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/statgtestgof.html
Basically, you plug in the distribution you see and compare it with the one you expected. What you get is the probability of that distribution occurring by chance. So if we plug in the observed data for all the pollsters and assume equal likelihood for all trailing digits we get a p=0.006. Whoops, looks like our assumption isn't quite correct. As the blog author notes, the observed distribution is humped a little, favouring the middle numbers. He also gives a possible explanation. For giggles, the probability of the Strategic Vision results given equally probable trailing digits is absolutely microscopic: p=1.44x10^-17. Together those tell us that our assumption of equal digit distribution is probably not quite right, but the Strategic Vision data still looks mighty funny.
Okay, so assume instead that most pollsters aren't making up their numbers. Not that their numbers are necessarily accurate, but that they're at least not making them up off the top of their heads. So using the data from all pollsters as a template, how likely is the Strategic Vision distribution? That's a G test of independence: http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/statgtestind.html. We could use Fisher's exact test, but I can't find one that will do a 2x10 table.
Plugging in the data, we get G=43.068, d.f.=9, which gives p=2.09x10^-6. The blog author was actually a little careless when he said the chances of Strategic Vision's results are millions to one against. If you insist on the equal-probability theory then the odds are 70 quadrillion to one against Strategic Vision and 166 to one against the industry as a whole. Taking the more realistic approach that the industry average is a better representation of the actual probability, the odds against Strategic Vision's results are about half a million to one against. Not millions to one, but close enough.