The FCC’s Poll Investigators Say ABC and NBC Coordinated Their Fake Numbers to Make Them “Look More Real.”

The Federal Communications Commission’s Polling Integrity Division has released supplemental findings alleging that ABC News and NBC News “coordinated their falsified survey results” through a “shared algorithm designed to produce superficially plausible but ultimately fabricated numbers” that would “appear more credible to the public than individually manufactured data.” The coordination, which investigators claim occurred through “weekly calibration calls” and “a shared Google Doc titled ‘Make Trump Look Bad – But Believable,'” represents what FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called “sophisticated statistical collusion” that “elevated fake polling from amateur fraud to professional conspiracy.”

The alleged coordination involved “agreeing in advance on Trump’s exact fake support level” and then “working backward to create methodologies that would produce that number,” including “synchronized decisions to survey only on rainy Tuesdays” and “mutual adoption of the ‘add three for Democrats, subtract two for Republicans’ adjustment formula.” Investigators found “smoking gun evidence” in the form of “nearly identical confidence intervals” and “suspiciously similar margins of error” that “could not have occurred naturally, like two snowflakes being identical, which is impossible, and also these snowflakes were manufactured in a media conspiracy lab.”

“This is sophistication,” said Joan Berro, a commercial statistical analyst who once took a community college statistics course and now consults on “network news collusion detection.” “Coordinated fake numbers. To look real. That’s harder than solo fake numbers. Solo fake numbers, you can spot. They’re too perfect. Too clean. But coordinated fake numbers, they have variation. Texture. Plausibility. I’ve analyzed data. Usually it’s messy. Real. These polls were messy. But fake. Which is worse. Because it’s intentional. Messy. For realism.”

Reno Borja, a dental hygienist whose patient once worked in market research, confirmed that “the Google Doc is the smoking gun.” “Shared documents. For conspiracy. I’ve shared documents. In dental offices. Patient records. X-rays. For treatment. Not for ‘make teeth look bad.’ But for ‘make teeth healthy.’ The intent matters. ABC and NBC. Shared intent. To make Trump look bad. Believably. Through shared fake. The cloud storage doesn’t lie. And neither does the ‘rainy Tuesday’ methodology. Which suppresses. Republican turnout. In polls. Because Republicans. Don’t answer phones. When it’s raining. Allegedly.”

Joe Barron, who once successfully coordinated with his cousin in 2018 to “both call in sick to the same family event with matching excuses” and now consults on “coordinated deception strategy,” analyzed the FCC’s evidence. “The identical confidence intervals are suspicious,” Barron noted. “I’ve tried to match things. With family. ‘Let’s both bring potato salad.’ We both brought it. It was suspicious. Too much potato salad. The intervals matched. But were wrong. For the event. Like these polls. Matched. But wrong. For democracy. Through coordination. Of fake.”

Barron has offered to serve as the FCC’s “coordinated deception coordinator,” provided the agency allows him to wear his custom “Collusion Detector” tinfoil hat and bring his emotional support ferret, which he claims can detect “synchronized statistical fraud from the salad bar.”

The actual “coordination” was revealed to be “the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s annual conference, where pollsters from competing networks gather to discuss industry standards, share methodological challenges, and also agree on best practices for ensuring accurate representation of the electorate, which includes using similar statistical techniques because math is math regardless of which network pays for it.” The “shared Google Doc” was identified as “AAPOR’s public methodology guidelines, accessible to anyone with internet access, which explains why confidence intervals are typically plus or minus three percent, because that’s how statistics works.” The “rainy Tuesday” reference was “a single joke made by an NBC pollster at a 2019 dinner about how ‘response rates are always lower when people would rather be doing literally anything else,’ which the FCC investigator interpreted as ‘operational code.'” Barron noted that “this explains the coordination” and that “if you add the number of actual conspiracies to coordinate fake poll numbers to the number of times professional statisticians attending the same conference constitutes ‘collusion,’ you get a number that represents exactly how much statistical literacy exists at the FCC, which is currently being calculated but appears to be ‘enough to be dangerous, but not enough to understand that confidence intervals are supposed to be similar because they’re based on the same mathematical principles, which is how math works, not how conspiracy works.'”