The day after the vice presidential debate, the conservative news website WorldNetDaily.com (WND) published a news article denouncing as “seemingly skewed” the online polls that favored Senator John Edwards over Vice President Dick Cheney. But in the past, when online poll results have favored President George W. Bush, WND has touted those findings.
The October 6 article stated: “Democrats are fraudulently skewing online polls asking about last night's vice presidential debate to favor Sen. John Edwards -- at least that's the contention of several Net users who have pointed out strangely lopsided results in various surveys.” The article also noted that, according to National Review Online contributor Jim Geraghty, “the Democratic National Committee is sending out the seemingly skewed results in triumphant e-mails to its supporters.”
But WND has previously promoted online polls when the results favored Bush. On August 12, a WND article touted an online poll that was “forecasting a landslide victory for President Bush, who collects 48 of the 50 states in this year's electoral race.” While the article, written by WND executive news editor Joe Kovacs, noted that the America Online poll was “unscientific” and cited scientific polls showing the race between Bush and Senator John Kerry to be much closer, Kovacs also claimed that the online poll's results were “what some political observers might view as shocking news.” Kovacs wrote a follow-up article, posted the next day, which noted that “John Kerry has experienced a surge, jumping from just 13 electoral votes to 111” but also noted WND's own online poll, which found that “87 percent [believed that] Bush would win, with about 56 percent believing it would be in a landslide fashion.”
On September 3, Kovacs again reported on the America Online poll. The lead paragraph of this article read: “In the hours after accepting the Republican nomination for another four years in the White House, President Bush's popularity skyrocketed in the America Online straw poll, as he led in all 50 states.”
WND has in the past recognized that online polls can be easily skewed; in 2001, the site beefed up security on its own online poll to reduce the opportunity for manipulation. As a May 18, 2001, article stated: “Some Net users were manipulating the results of our polls through technological means, sometimes seemingly voting hundreds of times in a short period.” Despite that security upgrade, WND's October 6 article noted that “one reader wrote to WorldNetDaily about the newssite's poll [on the vice presidential debate], pointing out that 2,000 votes were added to three separate pro-Edwards responses 'in the middle of the night.'”