To: The Leadership and Members of WAPOR and AAPOR

An Open Letter: Defending the Scientific Integrity of Our Industry

The recent news that Gallup US is discontinuing a significant time series is not an isolated event or a mere business decision. It is the inevitable symptom of over a decade-long erosion of our professional foundation—a decline many of us have warned about, only to be met with silence.

For years, our industry has stood by while its core principles were dismantled. When Ann Selzer was targeted with litigation in late 2024, where was our collective voice? When Siena College and The New York Times were dragged into court over their methodology in early 2026, did we stand as a united front to defend the validity of rigorous research?

The truth is, we have allowed the perimeter of our science to be breached.

The cost of silence

When ”Fake polls” became a political talking point, we failed to provide a robust defense. Tragically, those accusations contained a grain of truth—not because the science of sampling is flawed, but because we allowed the market to be flooded with unscientific ”garbage” that we failed to distinguish from legitimate research.

We stopped defending the Gallup model and the necessity of probability sampling. Instead of asserting that these are the only proven methods for reliable population estimates, we allowed voices to claim that ”science no longer works” or that non-response bias made rigor impossible.

The transparency paradox

In our pursuit of transparency, we inadvertently created a trap. By being honest about the ”messiness” of real-world probability sampling—weighting, non-response, and complexity—we made rigorous science look ”broken” to the untrained eye. Meanwhile, unscientific, non-probability ”black box” surveys appeared clean, cheap, and decisive.

We watched as established universities began using non-scientific ”convenience” samples as the basis for peer-reviewed papers. The industry adopted a ”good enough” mentality, citing budget constraints as an excuse to abandon integrity.  Non-probability surveys began reporting margins of error, a mathematical impossibility for that methodology, without facing professional repercussions. Weird poll results were treated as a weird population, not the obvious problem with bad data.

A future reproducibility crisis of our own making

By treating science as a luxury rather than a requirement, we have fueled a reproducibility crisis that now threatens the very fabric of a knowledge-based society. This is not just about politics; it is about the fundamental ability of a civilization to understand itself through data.

When firms like Gallup US or Pew are left to stand alone, they become the targets of criticism simply because they are the only ones left to follow the rules. When rigorous scientists are the minority, they are the ones blamed for the failures of a majority that has already abandoned the craft.

The call to action

I am writing to you today because it is not too late, but the window is closing.

We cannot expect commercial firms to fight state administrations or legal giants alone; those are battles of attrition they are destined to lose. However, WAPOR and AAPOR must lead the defense of the science itself.

I urge our associations to:

• Differentiate explicitly: Draw a hard line between scientific probability-based research and unscientific data collection.
• Educate the public: Be the loudest voice in the room when media outlets present unscientific polls as legitimate population estimates.

Optionally:

• Defend the practitioners: Create a rapid-response mechanism to support researchers facing legal or political intimidation for following scientific protocols.

If we do not stand up for scientific methodology now, we remain a primary cause of the collapse of functional statistics. We are the last line of defense. If we continue to remain silent, we are choosing to let the era of reliable knowledge end on our watch.

Respectfully,

Torbjörn Sjöström
WAPOR and AAPOR member
WAPOR National representative
Owner Novus, and Gallup Nordic (No affiliation with Gallup US)