Utah firm hired to smear Romney?

OREM — For 21 years, Western Wats, a Utah research data-collection firm that does most of its work over the phone and via the Web, has quietly provided jobs for the corps of college kids who arrive each year to study at Brigham Young University or Utah Valley State College.

But a recent political brouhaha ended that behind-the-scenes anonymity.

Reports surfaced that telephone "push polls," purported by some to have been done by Western Wats interviewers, were attempts to plant negative views of Mitt Romney in critical presidential primary states.

But, without acknowledging a role in the survey, Western Wats' own Web site points readers to another term: "message testing."

On Nov. 11, at least 16 people in New Hampshire and Iowa, states with early presidential primaries, participated in 20-minute phone surveys about the election and candidates. Critics labeled the surveys "push polls."

Employees at the Western Wats offices on the old WordPerfect campus in north Orem are aware of the national attention their company has been garnering — but they declined to talk about it and referred all questions to a company spokesman.

Western Wats officials have been under scrutiny since allegations were made that the company engaged in a push poll to taint the public's view of GOP presidential candidate Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and the man largely credited with turning around the scandal-ridden 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics.

Robert Maccabee, the company's director of client services, denied that the company, which also has offices in Provo and Spanish Fork, engaged in push polling, a method of influencing voters through the auspices of a poll.

"I can tell you we do not do push polling," Maccabee said.

Maccabee pointed to Western Wats' Web site, in which readers are presented definitions of legitimate polling, "message testing" and "unethical" push polls.

The site in turn refers readers to a Web-posted statement from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, which does not consider "message testing" to be unethical.

"Political campaigns routinely sponsor legitimate 'message-testing' surveys that are used by campaign consults to test out the effectiveness of various possible campaign messages or campaign ad content, often including negative messages," the AAPOR statement reads. "Political message-testing surveys may sometimes be confused with fake polling."

So the subject may come down to whether the controversial survey was a "push poll" or "message testing." And Western Wats isn't saying whether it played a role. "Confidentiality agreements prohibit us from commenting on specific projects and/or clients," the company's statement says.