A firm calling itself Wedgewood Polls posted a statement on social media last Tuesday, October 20, admitting that most of the polling it had published was not real. It said one poll, in Nebraska, had actually been conducted. The Washington Examiner reported the admission the following morning.

The firm described itself as “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight” in political polling. It added that “the polling industry needs major reform.”

By the time it said so, the numbers had already travelled.

Wedgewood said it had been added to the polling aggregators run by the New York Times, FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub. Its figures were also cited on air and in reporting by MS Now.

That is the part worth slowing down on. The fabrications did not circulate on the fringe of the internet. They were picked up by the aggregators that mainstream coverage of a midterm election is built on, and no one running those aggregators appears to have caught it.

The loudest objections have come from Democrats, which is what makes this difficult to wave away as a partisan complaint.

Mallory McMorrow, until recently a Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, wrote “DON’T GET COMPLACENT AND DON’T TRUST THE POLLS.” She also said plainly that “polling is broken.”

Neera Tanden, a liberal commentator and former Biden administration official, said “a lot of smart people fell for the op.” Retiring Michigan Senator Gary Peters said “we saw polls that were questionable right from the start for me.”

Wedgewood’s own account is the only source for its motive, and it is not a neutral one. A firm caught publishing invented numbers has an obvious interest in calling the whole thing a demonstration rather than a hoax.

What is not in dispute is the gap it exposed. There is no licensing body for political pollsters, no requirement to publish a methodology, and no check at the aggregator stage that a firm releasing numbers actually surveyed anyone.

Nine days remain before the election, and the polls still being published are the real ones as far as anybody can tell.