Reply #8: She is small potatoes and dirty as sin

[Gormy Cuss]

DOJ indicted her based on eleven separate surveys between 2001-2004 -- no indication which were polls or for Bush. These were for the most part small, cheap quick-turnaround polls, with interviews purportedly completed in a week or less. The most expensive survey cost $24,000. Most were in the range of $4000-6000. The falsified data ran the gamut from wholly faked interviews to post interview recoding of gender and other attributes to fill quota groups. I'm willing to bet that in every case this company underbid the competition in order to win the work.

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/ct/Documents/DataUSA%2520Indictment.pdf

From the company website I learned that they 'maintain' 50 CATI stations and some level of executive interviewing capacity. The only discussion of sampling touts the sample module in their CATI software, a product called OSCAR. I'm not familiar with it but the software probably produces standard cross tabulations and summary statistics but not much else. The company may not have any professional employees other than the owners and the phone room manager.

on edit: one problem with using this sort of vendor is it's easy for them to fake a few interviews to meet quota. Most don't, but there are always a few bad actors in every business. As a client when we farmed out work to this type of vendor we always used our own employees to verify a certain percentage of interviews as a precaution. Both the bid request and the vendor's contract would make it clear that we would do this.