Experts: Irvine Poll Pushed Ethical Limits

In the careful science of public opinion research, truth is the goal. In the raucous art of politics, truth is often a casualty. Mix the two, and ethical questions can arise.

That’s the ugly lesson researchers at Cal State Fullerton’s Social Science Research Center learned last week with the news that questions they asked in a recent telephone survey paid for by a political opponent of an Irvine mayoral candidate included inaccurate statements about the candidate’s policy positions.

City Councilman Mike Ward and his supporters charged that the university had become a party to a political smear campaign by conducting a “push poll” -- one designed to feed survey participants misleading information that will influence their votes.

Experts agree with university officials that the 90-question survey, which reached 600 Irvine voters, was too small to qualify as a push poll. To be effective, a push poll -- a massive telemarketing technique -- would have to reach many thousands of people to influence an election in a city the size of Irvine.

But by including five questions that misstated Ward’s stands on such city issues as building a light-rail line through a neighborhood, allowing a horse racetrack and casino in the proposed Great Park, and tripling the size of a nearby jail, the university’s pollsters improperly flirted with partisan politics, those experts said.

“I don’t think we should be doing things in which we are deliberately spreading false information.... It sounds pretty sleazy,” said Mick Couper, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research who heads the standards committee for the American Assn. for Public Opinion Research. “I think a university should be held to a higher standard -- especially a public university.”

By law, neither the university nor its research center can promote political candidates, although center officials said they often do surveys for clients who use the results for political advocacy.

The $16,308 Irvine survey was paid by HTP & Associates, which is run by Ed Dornan, a political backer of Mayor Larry Agran. Agran, whose term ends in November, is backing Ward’s opponent, Councilwoman Beth Krom, to succeed the mayor while he runs for a council seat.

Cal State Fullerton President Milton A. Gordon on Thursday defended the poll, but offered regret of “misperceptions that this survey project has caused.” The flap has prompted the university to reevaluate its policies governing the research center’s polling work.

“There’s absolutely an ethical question there -- even though it’s not a push poll,” said Michael Dimock, research director of the nonprofit Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. “If you’re ostensibly an academic or nonprofit independent pollster, the obligation you have is to the truth. If a client comes to you to test something that’s patently false, there’s an ethical question about contributing to such an endeavor.”

Dornan said the poll was intended to “determine the strength and weaknesses” of Ward and other candidates in the Nov. 2 election. He said that if anything was incorrect in the questions that were asked about Ward, he “can clarify it in a campaign.”

The controversy -- and the ambiguity surrounding it -- echo a case from the 2000 presidential Republican primary campaign when Sen. John McCain of Arizona accused then-Gov. George W. Bush of Texas of using a push poll before the South Carolina election to discredit him. Bush denied it; reporters who investigated the claim found the evidence less than compelling. A survey distorting McCain’s record was conducted by the Bush campaign, but not in the large numbers required to make it a useful push poll, survey experts said.

Test marketing of false messages is not uncommon in politics, said Mark Baldassare, director of research for the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California in San Francisco. Campaigns may ask “push questions” and use the responses to develop disingenuous campaign strategies, he said. “You’re trying to see if these messages move public opinion,” he said.

But while push polling is universally reviled by leaders in the surveying industry, the difference between legitimate testing of a negative message and unseemly push questioning is less precise. With minor changes, a hypothetical question can easily become a lie.

For some in the industry, “the line between truthfulness and untruthfulness is somewhat unclear,” said Dimock of the Pew Center.

This murky realm of push questions woven into the fabric of an otherwise legitimate survey troubles experts who say an ounce of deception can easy taint a pound of honest polling science.

“If somebody walks into your office with a bag of money and asks you to do something [questionable], you can’t ask, ‘How much is in the bag?’ and then make a decision,” said Lee Miringoff, president of the National Council on Public Polls. “You have to know enough to throw them out of your office.”

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Times staff writer Jean O. Pasco contributed to this report.