Michael Cohen's Effort To Rig Reader 'Polls' Shows Exactly Why They Mean Nothing

Michael Cohen , President Donald Trump ’s former lawyer, promised an IT company tens of thousands of dollars to influence online reader polls   like the ones conducted on the Drudge Report in Trump’s favor, according to The Wall Street Journal . The results of those polls were often regurgitated by media outlets , conservative figures like Sean Hannity and Trump himself . 

That Cohen was able to cook up such a plan highlights the glaring problems with reader polls, and why — as we’ve written previously — they shouldn’t be confused with real surveys.

Scientific polling, whether conducted by phone, using an online panel, or in some other fashion, is fundamentally designed to be representative . It relies on some mix of sampling (choosing who’s selected to take the survey) and weighting (adjusting the data to account for the fact that some types of people are more likely than others to respond). 

Recent changes in technology have complicated that process , and even rigorous polling is far from infallible . But there’s an enduring, basically sound underlying principle: making the pool of respondents look as much as possible like the larger population whose opinions the pollsters are trying to measure.

That’s why, even if a scientific poll reaches only a thousand or so people, it can reflect the opinions of a broader group, whether that’s something like registered Republican voters or the American public as a whole. 

The problem with reader polls isn’t that they’re conducted online. In this day and age, there are plenty  of scientific  web-based pollsters  with procedures in place to conduct representative surveys. The problem with reader polls is the lack of any provisions for sampling or weighting and the lack of even basic safeguards against being gamed by online mobs.

As Democratic primary season heats up, it’s likely that similar types of reader polls will start to make a reappearance as well. But even when a campaign isn’t making a systematic effort to rig them, they are still of extremely limited utility for understanding what Americans think.

To sum up: Any “poll” that does not exert some measure of control over who takes it and how many times they do so is not really a poll, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.