TX SEN: Cruz +14 (CB Polling)

[Adam Griffin]

these guys were right about AL Senate Race. They had Jones winning in their final poll and not Moore.


cbpolling.press/2017/12/10/doug_jones_on_verge_of_winning/

ALERT LIKELY FAKE POLLSTER ALERT SEE BELOW

Haha.

So guys: "gorelick" here must be whoever runs CB Polling, just so you know. I got curious because I don't recall a poll or scenario from them that showed Jones in the lead just before the election.

I went and inspected the website, accessing their sitemap (which shows when each post, page or element on the site was last modified). Low and behold:



The post linked to above (about Jones being within striking distance on "December 10") was last modified today - around an hour before gorelick posted. Now, that alone doesn't mean that a page's URL structure and publish date have been spoofed (which is easily doable) - perhaps it was edited for grammar or something, but...

I checked out Wayback Machine to see whether or not there were any previously indexed versions of the post (usually it doesn't take more than a few days for Wayback Machine to get a snapshot). Lo and behold, there wasn't any backup.

In fact, the only two posts on CB Polling that don't have Wayback images preserved are the two highlighted above - both "last modified" today (the other is the O'Rourke poll post, which was likely published today as well). If it were a case of none of the posts on the site being preserved, it'd be a different story. But everything else - including a post from the same week - is on Wayback.

It looks like a chunk of pages on the site were modified at virtually the same time back on October 29: that could be any number of things that are innocent (and maybe Virginia or somebody can give us an idea) but the fact that just this one page was "last modified" on its own today and right after that link was posted is suspicious.

TL;DR: at best, "CB Polling" edited the AL-SEN post above after the fact to make it look like it was predictive; at worst, the post itself was created today to defend its track record on here and then "gorelick" posted the fake AL-SEN poll info on here. There's no evidence - unlike the other, comparably old posts on CB's website - that the page existed prior to the AL-SEN election.

[Adam Griffin]

It's also worth noting that when using the "inurl:" command on Google, even the O'Rourke post shows as being published "one day ago". When I do the same for the Doug Jones post, I get an error; it hasn't been indexed by Google, which likely means it's a fresh page created within the past few hours. All other posts on the site show up with the same dates on Google as in their URL structures when queried in the same way - it's just this one post that doesn't seem to have any history!

[Adam Griffin]

Just to illustrate what I mean with the "inurl:" command. Posts published both before and after the supposed date of publication of the AL-SEN poll post show up just fine; all posts in fact show up via that command...except the one last modified today claiming they predicted a tied Alabama race. What are the odds?

[Adam Griffin]

In their defense, it appears this image was uploaded to Imgur 18 days ago (AFAIK that can't be forged), so perhaps they really did have some poll showing this result somewhere...but the spoofing of the broader post to appear as if it was made before the election calls into question any validity of their outfit whatsoever.