Funny how the party that always screams the loudest about election fraud is the party that keeps getting caught (but somehow not really punished) committing election fraud.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/former-miami-lawmaker-fra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Artiles#Election_fraud
this still seems like the republican party trying to do some election fraud against themselves?
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Oct29-5.html
It ends with:
Yesterday, The New York Times threw a wrench in the works. It reported that Dan J. was not happily living in his quiet fishing village reading books about fish and tending to his garden when he suddenly decided to run for the Senate. Nope. In fact, Peltola's team combed through voting lists to find all the Dan Sullivans in the state and then carefully selected Dan J. and helped him get on the ballot. This sort of trickery is actually not unusual. Other candidates have been doing this kind of stuff for years. The question is whether it will affect the election. Republicans who were planning to vote for Dan S. will still do so. The big unknown is are there many Peltola voters who will be disgusted by this trick and switch to Dan S. The disclosure may not be fatal, though, because: (1) not all Alaskans will even know about this before they vote, (2) some Alaskans have already voted, and (3) some people who like Peltola will admire her cleverness for pulling this off.
The revelation could possibly affect the lawsuit, but probably not. Parties often recruit candidates. In primaries, it is not unusual for parties to (financially) support someone on the other team who they think would be a weak general-election opponent. This kind of stuff is actually the original use of the thing we call rodent reproduction. Republicans did it this year in a couple of Democratic House primaries, for example. It is scuzzy, but perfectly legal, to contribute to a candidate who you think is a weak opponent to your candidate. In fact, there have been many primaries where a Democrat switched his or her registration to Republican in order to vote for a crazy fringe candidate, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this development is not going to help Peltola. (V)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
On top of that it's not election fraud, though it is potentially some kind of fraud if they were involved in betting markets.
Fake polls are definitely a “both sides” thing. A notorious example in the 2024 election was the Selzer poll, which was ludicrous when it was released and confirmed to be such during the actual election. 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental. Polls generally speaking have long been used to shape public opinion and policy more than they have to actually understand the public .
Nowadays both sides are also doing what they can to manipulate the elections via prediction markets.
It failed in 2024 when it didn't weight its model to handle differences in demographics vs the sampled population. She accounted for age, sex, and district - but not education, party identification, or past voting behavior. (The specifics of why the model failed is up for debate, but it was the same model that had been used for many years and was reasonably accurate).
From 2023, here's a description of her polling methodology:
https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/10530/j-ann-...
But it's difficult, even I know where to look and a lot of the methodology statements get hidden or are inadequate to make that assumption. The main thing I'm going to tell you that distinguishes us from most other polling, not all, there's some very good polls out there that do what I do, which is we don't make assumptions about what that future electorate is going to look like. We let the data -- we try to get out of the way of the data showing us. So, you'll look and they'll say how they weighted the data, this that and the other, and then they include in that who the likely demographics of the 2024 caucus are likely to be. And I go, really? How do you know what that is likely to be? Or they're weighting it based on who they voted for in the 2020 election or other factors like that, or maybe they're only talking to people who have caucused before. And this approach I call polling backward, that if you're creating a model of the future, what are you going to base it on? You're going to base it on what happened in the past. And I know that things can change. So, I want to have my fingers off the data, my dirty fingers I try to keep them off the data, so it will reveal to me how that's going to go.
From 2024 https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/11885/j-ann-...
But for everybody else we keep them on the phone to get age, sex, what county they live in. That is going to give us some geography so that we can weight all of those people, I think there were 1,100 and some in our final poll, to look like the state of Iowa because that we know. And then we extract from that those people who made our likely voter screen and interviewed them. So, if they are proportionately more women who pass that screen, they are going to show up here but they are weighted at the statewide level. It's a little geeky. But one of the things I've been thinking about is with caucuses we take you if you definitely or probably will participate and maybe our screen was too tight. I don't know, there's no way to undo it and sort of check, well what would the probably people have said, because we very politely terminated the people who just said they would probably vote. But that has been our system since 2008.I mean this defense is effectively saying that polls are actually worthless and should be ignored anyway - that’s what “the best polling methodology we have can sometimes be off by 15 points” would actually mean.
If you really believe “good” pollsters don’t do this, you should question how the Harris campaign’s internal polling outperformed them. How did a political campaign correctly predict with polling all along that she was behind Trump when public polling consistently showed her ahead until tightening immediately before? Public polling, again, is generally more of a tool to shape opinion than it is to reflect reality. Private campaign polling that’s limited to leadership only is much more likely to be accurate since they actually want the truth.
Yes.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/f...
One can debate how the change in political polling has been done over the past decades. Reverse polling (weighting) vs forward polling (weighting).
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/weighting-pol...
https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surve...
Seltzer used (and consistently used) forward polling. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5177322/high-profile-io...
Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.
If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.
Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306130304/https://projects....
Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.
The forecaster in question was fully aware of everything you're saying and yet he blew 100k on what he thought was a sure thing that turned out to not be. Maybe if he was as statistically-aware as you claim, he would not have made the bet, since he should have known there was a reasonable statistical probability he was wrong. I don't demand Nate get "100% of predictions correct", I'm mocking him because he's overrated and he made an outrageously confident prediction that blew up in his face when almost anyone who wasn't high on their own supply could see he was wrong, or at least could clearly see there was no basis for such a confident prediction. "There is an 80% chance Trump wins Florida by < 8pts" is very different from "I'll put down 100k that Trump wins Florida by < 8 pts."
Of course the real problem is "statistical probabilities" don't actually factor into it and 538's model is actually not that well calibrated, and anyway we're talking about real-world forecasting, for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information unless the only reason you care about election forecasts is to gamble on prediction markets.
> for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information
I mean, this is basically how weather forecasts work too. Would you say that weather forecasts are useless? I don't think they are. I think the existence of weather forecasts results in people being prepared for rain more than they otherwise would be, even if sometimes they neglect to bring an umbrella because the forecast predicted a low chance of rain. In the same way, political forecasting is actionable in terms of how politicians and their parties conduct their campaigns, focusing on areas where spending their time, energy, and campaign funds will get the most reward for their investment. I suspect a political party that makes use of forecasting will outperform one that doesn't if all else could be equalized. As for benefits to the general public, one of the big reasons Silver got into forecasting was to counteract the exact thing you were talking about earlier - he hated pundits crafting a narrative and trying to influence public opinion on elections baselessly, so his goal was to establish a more objective, numbers-based approach that was less susceptible to people just making shit up about elections.
> 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental.
Not a pollster, but Nate Silver publicly challenged someone on Twitter to a $100k bet over how red Florida would go. IIRC Silver was predicting 3-5% margin, Twitterer said minimum 8%. Trump won by 14%. Even Silver, who lived and breathed analyzing polls and their reliability, made a mistake of that magnitude with his own money on the line. Sometimes the votes don't line up with polling, and sometimes the professionals genuinely don't see it coming.