As we previously reported, KFOX14 conducted an unscientific online poll on the “Debt Plaza” to determine what percentage of El Pasoans support the $412 million project.
The poll spanned the period from June 30 to July 14.
Within 24 hours of the start of the poll, the percentage of voters opposing the Debt Plaza immediately shot up to over 70%, peaking at 75% last week.
Then in the final days of the poll, the percentage of Debt Plaza opponents decreased steadily until bottoming out at 49% yesterday morning.
Considering that the percentage of voters opposing the debt plaza had remained stable for more than a week and that more than 3,500 votes had been cast, we found this very suspicious, so we conducted an experiment.
With only two hours left in the poll, we reached out to the admins of two fiscally conservative social media platforms that have a combined following of more than 250,000 people. They shared the KFOX14 poll multiple times, asking their followers to vote against the deck plaza.
(Lest anyone accuses us of meddling, we hasten to point out that KFOX14 chose to conduct their poll unscientifically rather than hiring a professional firm to run a scientific poll. Eorum culpa!)
As we predicted, in the last 90 minutes of the poll, the number of votes surged powerfully from 3,630 to 4,284, an increase of 654.
We can guarantee that well over 90% of those final voters were against the Debt Plaza. Thus, the poll should have ended with at least 55% of voters against the project.
Instead, in the final moments of the poll we watched the percentage of Debt Plaza opponents rise to only 51%, then decline to 49%, before settling at 50% when the poll closed.
That is mathematically impossible.
We wrote to the Shauna Ziegler, the News Director of KFOX14, to ask her whether their poll was a paid advertisement and she stated on the record “it is not.”
We also asked her whether KFOX14 manipulated the percentages, to which she replied “We don’t have the ability to manipulate the votes.”
She did not comment on the statistical reliability of the poll or tell us whether the network will air a report on the poll results.
We hope that in the future KFOX14 will conduct scientific polling rather than online polls of this type, which by their very nature can be manipulated and weaponized by politicians and their supporters.