Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Daily Kos Caught Lying

Excuse me this moment of schadenfreude, but this is too rich. Apparently the polling firm Daily Kos contracted with for hundreds of polls in its push to help the Democrats contest the 2010 elections has been caught fabricating its results.

To Kos' credit, he has cut ties with the firm, Research 2000, and renounces any blog posts using their results. This is a BFD of Biden-esque proportions, because the difference of just a few percentage points on a poll, especially one that's been finely sliced and diced into subcategories, can have a big effect on perceptions - which can affect elections.

1 comment:

  1. It was interesting, especially the odd-odd and even-even pairings. Something I'd never considered before, but looking at just that first example (28 pairs, I think) is enough to tell me something is wrong. For that correspondence to show up in 177 out of 178 pairings is simply too much coincidence to be believed. The lack of variations of zero is also telling, and would be a common result of people making up random sequences.

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