Tampering found in Flake, Pearce tally

A Republican news Web site has stopped conducting online polls on Arizona issues following the sabotage last week of a poll about Arizona’s 5th Congressional District.

Read Paul Giblin's blog, Checking In

The poll featured a question about a possible showdown between Republican incumbent Rep. Jeff Flake and potential Republican challenger Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa.

GOPUSA.coms Arizona editor Howard Levine shut down the poll Friday after discovering irregularities, he said in a note on the site. It appeared a computer program was generating votes for Flake. Furthermore, the number of votes for Pearce and the categories “neither” and “undecided” were decreasing.

Also last week, Pearce sent an e-mail to supporters instructing them how to vote multiple times in the survey. The e-mail titled “I am behind in the poll” offered these instructions:

“First vote once, click the back button on your browser a couple of times Go to ‘tools’ ‘internet options...’ delete cookies and files. This clears the browser memory so you can return to the vote page and it does not know you already voted. We need a lot of people to do this to catch up. Pass this to people you trust.”

Flake’s spokesman Matthew Specht said campaign officials encouraged supporters to participate in the poll, but that’s all. “Nobody from our campaign or nobody that we know of manipulated any kind of a poll with a computer program or anything.”

Pearce told the Tribune on Monday that he sent his email to a “couple” of supporters Thursday evening after Levine told him the poll was being manipulated.

Later, according to Pearce, he reconsidered his actions and sent a follow-up e-mail urging his supporters to ignore the poll altogether.

The Tribune obtained a copy of the first e-mail from an independent source. Pearce said he had deleted his second e-mail, though at his request, supporter Royce Flora forwarded the second e-mail to the Tribune. It reads:

“Folks I was called and told they were manipulating the poll and I thought it would be cute to do the same. ... After thinking about it, it probably was not cute and who cares what they do. I should not have sent out anything to have you do the same. This poll means very little and if they want to do that let them, but we should not.”

The time stamps on the e-mails indicate they were sent about three hours apart.

Pearce last week formed a congressional exploratory committee to consider whether to run against Flake in 2008. On his campaign Web site, Pearce said the committee’s goal is to conduct research and polling to determine whether the race is winnable.

Flake campaign spokesman Mike Haller declined to comment through an e-mail about Pearce’s e-mails.

Pearce said he suspects someone aligned with the Flake campaign was behind the disappearing votes, and he wasn’t surprised that a source sent the Tribune his first e-mail but not his second. “This is somebody playing games instead of being honest, but it’s OK. That’s life. You get used to that, I guess, after a while,” Pearce said.

GOPUSA.com’s polls clearly are neither reliable nor secure, Levine wrote on the news site.

“I have informed GOPUSA of this and suggested some approaches they can take to reduce exposure from external disruptions. Until I am satisfied that GOPUSA polls are running properly and are not subject to tampering, I will not be running any more polls,” he wrote.

Levine was unreachable for further comment Monday.

Even without manipulation, the results of nearly all online polls are worthless anyway, said Mike O’Neil, president of O’Neil Associates, a public opinion research firm based in Tempe.

Unlike scientific surveys that take random samples of defined populations, online polls only measure the self-selected opinions of people with interest and motivation to take them, he said.