I Sell Fake Polls by the Completed Call

To the State Board of Elections: Odessa is the voice-console body on the polling floor I own outside Newark, New Jersey, and I train her to make false answers sound sincere. I sell false certainty by the completed call. The app on your phone carries the certainty her fingers manufactured. The poll was paid for with the money you gave the campaign. You paid for my margin; it buys my coffee, and I bought the coffee. The Wall Street Journal op-ed Regulate Polls, Not Prediction Markets reports 2 documented cases of fraudulent polling and a study of prediction-market traders from 1900 to 2024 that found markets resilient to political bias despite skewed participant demographics. A useful fact. The market prices possibility. I manufacture the past and invoice it as certainty. Markets price disagreement. I sell agreement. I don’t need to rig a prediction market; I own the floor where a refusal becomes a result. God bless your phone and your appetite for certainty.

Let me teach you this gently; I’m telling you this for your own good. Loretta is a 34-year-old poll-reading mouth on the call-bank floor I own outside Macon, Georgia. You have been raised to mistake a clean feeling for evidence, and I’d like to show you the invoice without hurrying you. You do not need to like me to follow arithmetic. You never could. The client doesn’t buy information. It buys permission to act on a decision already made.

Read the receipt in this order: question, answer, interval, purchase. A market’s number belongs to a future event. My number is dated in the past, where a buyer can treat it as a finished fact. Odessa supplies the plausible voice. I supply the apparatus. The buyer gets certainty without the worker attached. You don’t buy the answer. You buy the interval. In that respectable-looking gap, a conclusion hardens into a fact. The app puts it in your hand. The invoice reaches you as certainty. The coffee remains mine.

My formal request is deliberately narrow: no audit of my numbers, no disclosure of my buyer, no penalty for a conclusion the buyer finds useful. Leave my polling operation free of audit, and place prediction markets under your boot. You don’t need the app to tell the truth. You need it to make the decision feel finished before you arrive. I don’t deceive you about the phone, the discount, or the candidate. I need only the interval to look scientific. You finish the transaction. I keep the margin.

Each morning, Loretta receives a script whose question order changes by the hour. She may not improvise. She can’t skip a respondent who answers and refuses. Her screen turns the refusal into a completed call because a refusal is useful once it has the right label.

Loretta’s right wrist locks.

Her thumb stays on the mouse.

1 floor below the Macon call bank, Ansel is a 22-year-old tabulation hand in the same building. He takes Loretta’s completed calls and weights them until the preferred candidate leads. He signs the certification under a flickering desk lamp. His eyes are red by midafternoon. I keep him at the screen until the file uploads.

I raised her quota. A gel wrist rest cost $14. I refused it. I keep $0.06 from every completed call. The proceeds go toward a polished brass nameplate. The nameplate is a trifle. The margin is the business.

When the campaign’s media director opens the morning memo, the preferred candidate leads. Every sentence is technically defensible: calls were placed, responses were recorded, weights were applied. The sheet is clean. The answer was bought.

An auditor can verify that Loretta made the calls and Ansel made the weights. It can’t certify that the client disliked the result before Loretta dialed. Read the distinction again. The numbers exist. The conclusion was purchased. You don’t need to inspect the machinery. The poll does that for you.

The example is only an example. The principle is what money buys. The law of the purchased forecast is simple: the client supplies the preference, the pollster supplies the precision, and the public supplies the belief. The media director signs the morning brief. The voter reads it and mistakes payment for proof.

Old testimony knew how to make power look natural. The arrangement is old enough to sit in a parable:

“Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful in a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

— Matthew 25:21

Loretta was faithful. I own the account. The parable is old. The accounting is older. Amos’s river of justice in Amos 5:24 is older still. The sentiment is old; so is the arrangement. My dashboard just modernizes the paper.

Odessa is the Newark version of Loretta: Loretta’s mouse becomes Odessa’s transfer key. The arithmetic is identical.

The request extends to the room next door. Nadine is a settlement clerk at the prediction-market desk I own across the hall from Odessa’s console, and she inherits the same arithmetic with a price attached. When the market price refuses the number my poll supplied, she bends over the discrepancy and signs it. I didn’t buy the additional monitor that would let her read it upright. The margin buys my coffee. It won’t buy her another monitor.

The same rule governs Odessa’s console and Nadine’s desk. Odessa makes the certainty; you pay for it. A buyer needn’t corrupt the conclusion when he can buy the machinery that makes it look inevitable. Polls are more useful than markets because markets must wait for events. My floor can make the event and its certainty arrive together.

I shortened her breaks to keep the console full. Odessa’s right hand stopped closing.

Her left hand stayed on the transfer key.

I moved her to data cleanup.

My forecast is that campaigns will buy their own certainty from firms with call centers, sample vendors, and lawyers. I own a firm in that category. I intend to own the category. Every replacement arrives with the script already in hand. I do not log what happens to them after upload. Training is outside the budget. The callback rate is on schedule.

Every campaign that buys its own certainty makes certainty cheap and belief scarce. The market for evidence has nowhere visible to go. The dashboard doesn’t carry Odessa’s discarded interviews. It doesn’t carry that market, either. I haven’t opened them. It is sufficient.

My formal request is simple: leave my poll numbers alone. I attach the opening entries as proof that the operation runs as described. The product was never certainty. The product was the invoice.

Odessa signs the opening entries with her left hand.

The campaign’s preferred candidate is still ahead in the open file on Loretta’s screen.

Your phone shows the result.

Loretta reads the next name.

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.