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“Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate news source,” the statement said.
Notably, the three polling aggregators mentioned in the statement are not broadcast stations or news networks whose programming is carried on local broadcast stations. That’s relevant because Carr has repeatedly said he merely uses the FCC’s regulatory authority over broadcasters with licenses to use public spectrum, and not media outlets that do not have FCC licenses. Carr’s post yesterday warned broadcasters to “comply with their public interest obligations” under “the terms of their federal licenses.”
While Wedgewood Polls claimed that its data faced no scrutiny from news organizations, FiftyPlusOne said it was preparing to publish an article exposing the fraud and had sent a request for comment to Wedgewood. “They did not respond to our request, but instead posted a public statement on social media admitting that they had been fabricating data,” FiftyPlusOne wrote.
FiftyPlusOne, The New York Times, and VoteHub all say they did some vetting of Wedgewood before deciding to use its polls. FiftyPlusOne wrote:
Their statement alleges that FiftyPlusOne, The New York Times, and other poll aggregators did not conduct appropriate vetting of their firm prior to aggregating their polls; this is false. We reached out to them to ask who they were and confirm the methodology statement on their website. We were given two names, Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. We were able to independently confirm that Sims had previous experience in the polling industry and reviewed their methodology statement in detail. It is not atypical for a pollster to leave an existing firm, form their own, and self-fund some surveys to build reputation; we had no reason at the time to believe this case was any different. Wedgewood operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm, including collecting money from donors to conduct crowd-funded polls, and sharing raw survey data (which we now have confirmed was fraudulent) with FiftyPlusOne on Oct. 15, 2026.
NYT and VoteHub explain poll inclusion
VoteHub Head of Data Science Zachary Donnini said that after talking to Wedgewood’s “head pollster,” Votehub “assigned them a D grade and included their polling data on our site.” Meanwhile, the New York Times updated its polling page with a statement about Wedgewood.
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