The Pollwatcher: Another fraudulent pollster has gone bankrupt and a third group has just disappeared

Why a fake poll ended up in traditional poll tracking tools, how it was discovered, and the common thread in this year’s two fake poll scandals.

On Tuesday, a group calling itself Wedgwood Polls said in a since-deleted social media post that it had published fabricated polls during the midterm elections, saying it was an “experiment” to test whether media outlets and aggregators would report on the data. The announcement came after Wedgewood was asked to comment on the findings of an investigation into his work conducted by FiftyPlusOne, a website founded by former employees of the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight.