Gone Phishing

How a fake poll is being used to track and target Gables voters.

Consider this a public service announcement: That "poll" flooding Gables voters' inboxes last week? The one from "Eddy Diaz" at People Count USA? The one with your first name auto-populated in the greeting? The one that might just be the most egregious example of a push poll in recorded history? Yeah, that one. Don't respond to it. In fact, you’re better off marking it as spam.

Let's review the red flags, shall we? First, there's the likely fact that Eddy Diaz seems about as real as that Nigerian prince who needs you to hold onto $1.7M USD for him until he's done burying his recently deceased father (and if you Google "Eddy Diaz," you'll get a bunch of hits for professional baseball players, which becomes rather interesting when you remember Ariel's notorious baseball obsession). Then there's the web address in "Eddy's" email address, peoplecountusa.com, which, if you try to visit it, takes you to exactly the kind of homepage you hope to see from any credible and trustworthy organization:

According to the all-knowing internet, the People Count USA domain was purchased on August 20, 2023, which coincidentally coincides with the height of the November elections debate. Funny how a supposed polling outfit magically sprung into existence precisely when Ariel needed to publish a fake poll about the election-date issue. How serendipitous! And to think Ariel was this organization's first and only client.

And then there's the "poll" itself. Notwithstanding the fact that there’s no such thing as a scientifically sound mass-emailed online survey (since self-selected respondents and zero sampling controls automatically invalidate any pretense of statistical validity), the majority of the poll’s questions seem a little too, shall we say, rhetorical, to be a part of any legitimate attempt to evaluate preferences and opinions. But don’t just take my word for it. See for yourself:

These are fantastic questions. Not leading at all, not remotely partisan, clearly designed with nothing but scientific rigor in mind. In fact, they've inspired me to conduct some hard-hitting research of my own. You know, just a quick reader survey to gather some completely unbiased feedback about this newsletter:

No, but really, those "questions" aren't questions at all. And that "poll" isn't remotely a poll. It’s, in part, a negative attack ad that found its way into your email inbox instead of your actual mailbox. The only question they forgot to include was "On a scale from 'Concerned' to 'Very Concerned,' how concerned are you that Lago enjoys beating his wife and kids?”

But none of this is even the real reason I'm urging you to avoid this poll. Nor is it because I oppose practically everything KFC stands for (though I do), or because this survey has more in common with a political hatchet job than legitimate research (though it does). It's because, according to multiple credible and independent sources, the Kamikaze Kirk campaign—and let's be realistic here, the entire and ever-expanding KFC apparatus—is allegedly using this data to identify and target non-supporters they deem to be, shall we say, persuadable.

In other words, underneath that already shady push poll is an even shadier phishing expedition.

Personal Identifying Information

Any political poll worth the paper it’s printed on must, by necessity, collect demographic details from its respondents. Without the ability to analyze responses by age, gender, party affiliation, and other key demographics, a poll becomes meaningless noise. But there's a stark difference between collecting anonymous demographic data and harvesting personal identifying information. Indeed, I've never encountered a poll that so brazenly flaunts its disregard for basic privacy and confidentiality as this one does.

Consider the personalized email greeting. This isn't simple email automation scraping a name from your address, which is why your email address could be something like MaseratiMamacita69@acmemail.com and it would still read “Good morning, Melissa.” No, they're using your legal first name, pulled directly from voter rolls, the same records that contain your home address and other personal data.

Granted, most political campaigns—and I'm using that term charitably when it comes to KFC, which operates more like a criminal enterprise—have access to voter roll data. But none I've encountered, except those associated with Ariel, dare to merge this sensitive personal data with their polling operations. There's a reason for this bright ethical line: it exists to protect voter privacy and maintain polling integrity.

It’s so bizarre that I needed to double check just to make sure I wasn’t misreading the situation. So I reached out to a resident and longtime reader who I know has the relevant technical expertise and asked them to look at the poll and provide their opinion with respect to its safety. Here is the key portion of their unequivocal assessment (emphasis mine):

Yeah, just right click on the link to the poll and you can see they are using a tracked link. It uses query parameters to pass through a unique ID that is tied to your email address. So when you click through from the email to fill out their survey, their backend system automatically logs which response came from your specific tracked link. It is a super common integration pattern. Based on list-manage.com it looks like they are using mailchimp. The u= value should be the account id and the e= value is most likely the unique recipient id. Basically this means the survey responses are not actually anonymous at all since the system can map everything back to their email list. Pretty standard marketing tech stack stuff, but definitely sketchy AF for a political poll.

And here’s the tracking link in question, the digital fingerprint that reveals exactly how they're monitoring every respondent's answers. Note the track/click segment:

So what does all of this mean, exactly? It means if you took that poll, you did so with team KFC looking over your shoulder. You might as well invite Ariel into the voting booth with you next April so he can watch you mark your ballot. Oh, and by the way, this isn't an isolated incident. People Count USA has been deploying these surveillance polls since shortly after Ariel's election, each one strategically pushing Ariel's agenda on controversial issues like November elections and city manager removals. Some coincidence.

For anyone thinking I'm overstating the severity here, allow me to refer you to the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), which is widely recognized as the gold standard for polling ethics and methodology. It’s basically the highest authority there is on public polling. The AAPOR’s best practices are generally considered mandatory guidelines, and its published list of four condemned practices represent the cardinal sins of polling, bright lines that must never be crossed. Imagine that, there are certain practices that are so beyond the pale that the nation’s (world’s) leading polling authority felt it necessary to single them out for specific condemnation. Here is item three on that list:

3. Revealing the identity of individual respondents to a survey or participants in a research process without their permission.
It is normal research practice to pledge anonymity or confidentiality to the public in order to secure their cooperation and frankness in responding to questions. Revealing the identity of individuals, for whatever purpose, is a violation of that pledge unless a respondent’s prior informed consent has been obtained.

As someone fond of hyperbole as a rhetorical device, I’m not sure I can overstate the gross ethical breach this poll represents. It’s far more than an example of political malpractice, it’s a gross violation of the public trust that may, for all I know, constitute a violation of Florida’s robust, albeit, labyrinthine election laws. If I were Lago, I'd have already referred this to state authorities for good measure.

Not only does the poll fail to obtain informed consent for data sharing, it employs covert tracking to create a detailed database linking individuals to their political views. That this phishing operation runs through People Count USA, a shadowy front with an established pattern of push polling that mysteriously aligns with Ariel's agenda, reveals something far more sinister than your garden-variety political shenanigans. This isn't just about manipulating public opinion anymore; it's about constructing a surveillance state in miniature, right here in the City Beautiful.

And to think this isn’t even the worst part.

Knock Knock

It would be bad enough if this were a relatively simple case of political malpractice, missteps by unsophisticated political actors who simply don't grasp the importance of privacy-protecting safeguards. For one to not understand that you can't use the simple strategies gleaned from skimming Marketing For Dummies to conduct a political polling operation is a damning indictment in itself—the kind of amateurish mistake you'd expect from a certain bush-league political consultant turned blogger turned commissioner who oozes cheesy self-promotion from every greasy pore, someone whose wardrobe screams "I'm the king of mattress sales in Fargo, North Dakota" rather than "I'm a commissioner in the beautiful City of Coral Gables.”

But, alas, it is far worse than that, at least we can suspect that it is. Much like we suspected a great many terrible things about the mayoral recall campaign that ended up proving 100% true. According to multiple independent and highly credible sources, at least three residents—all senior citizens, all women, all of whom completed the People Count USA poll—were reportedly visited by Kirk campaign 'volunteers' within 48 hours of taking the poll. These volunteers allegedly arrived armed with knowledge of how these women answered the survey, questioning why they weren't supporting Kirk's mayoral bid.

Un-friggin-believable.

Again, these are merely reports at this point, word making its way through the grapevine. But it’s a grapevine that proved remarkably reliable during the recall campaign. Moreover, they are rumors that harmonize perfectly with what we already know.

We know the people behind this poll are tracking individual responses. We know that it stems from what is, at a minimum, a KFC adjacent operation. We know, at least those of us who have followed local politics for the last decade, that these kinds of shady campaign strategies are the hallmark of Ariel’s quasi-defunct consulting company, American Strategies, which I lovingly refer to as Soviet Strategies thanks to its notorious affinity for ethically dubious tactics. We know that the residents being targeted, older women, represent the most vulnerable, and often most impressionable, ones among us. We know that older women are Kirk’s favorite demo, as he views them as especially susceptible to his signature schmaltzy schmoozing, which I suspect he mistakes for charm:

And we know it will probably be left up to me, the one person in this game who isn't LARPing as a journalist, to flesh this out. Just as it was with the recall. It's almost comical, because I bet you if I were to walk into the Biltmore lobby right now with, God forbid, a roll of blue painter's tape hidden in my pocket, it would somehow set off some kind of Bat Cave style alarm over at the Miami Herald and CBS Miami offices. A gaggle of beat reporters would come pouring out of those buildings armed with Steno pads and Dictaphones ready to pen the next chapter in that saga. But then here you have a clearcut case of a political operation that is obviously tied to KFC running a phishing scheme and sending campaign goons to the homes of vulnerable residents and what do you get...crickets. I mean, all they had to do was poke around the People Counts USA survey for all of 30 seconds and they would have had enough material for a juicy story. A story that would have been a lot juicier, not to mention more relevant to the safety and wellbeing of Gables residents, than iteration #12 of the dead-end Rishi Kapoor story ever was.

Oh well.

Where all this goes is anyone's guess. I certainly couldn't tell you. I can tell you, however, where your copy of the People Counts USA email should go—straight in the trash folder followed by a permanent delete. And I can also tell you this: when a phantom polling outfit that bears all the hallmarks of Ariel's political operation sends out a push poll that secretly tracks your responses, merges them with your personal voter data, and potentially dispatches campaign operatives to your door to question your political choices—all while masquerading as legitimate public opinion research—we're no longer in the realm of typical political shenanigans. We're in the dark heart of KFC territory now. We're watching the systematic dismantling of voter privacy by people who seem to view ethical boundaries as mere suggestions and vulnerable residents as targets to be exploited. The fact that this operation continues unchecked by local media only underscores how crucial it is for residents to recognize and reject these tactics. Otherwise, we risk normalizing what should be universally condemned as an assault on the democratic process itself.