Online polls showing Trump won the debate were rigged

And this is from a news site owned by right-winger Rupert Murdoch

http://nypost.com/2016/09/27/online-polls-showing-trump-won-the-debate-were-rigged/

By Marisa Schultz
September 27, 2016 | 5:42pm

A series of online polls showing Donald Trump winning Monday night’s debate were rigged, according to a report on Tuesday.

While mainstream media and pundits quickly crowned Hillary Clinton the winner, Trump touted several online polls showing that he triumphed.

“Such a great honor. Final debate polls are in — and the MOVEMENT wins,” Trump tweeted.

Online polls aren’t given much credence because they aren’t scientifically representative samples of the electorate.

But The Daily Dot suggested online results from about 70 debate polls were particularly egregious because Trump supporters “artificially manipulated” the results “to create the false narrative” that he won.

Trump supporters using Reddit and 4chan message boards bombarded the online polls and spread the effort to Twitter to catapult the hashtag “#Trumpwon” to the No. 1 trending topic.

Established pollster Neil Newhouse says online surveys encourage a “stuffing the ballot box” mentality.

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“At the same time, the polls that were supposedly ‘manipulated’ weren’t actually polls to begin with. They are nothing more than ‘click-bait’ to get people to respond. Ignore these polls. They are not measuring what they purport to and are really quite worthless.”

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News outlets admit their results are far from scientific.

“Online reader polls like this one are not statistically representative of likely voters, and are not predictive of how the debate outcome will affect the election,” Time.com wrote in an online disclaimer. The Time poll shows Trump won 56 percent to 44 percent with 1.8 million responses.

“They are a measure, however imprecise, of which candidates have the most energized online supporters, or most social media savvy fan base.”