The two examples you linked of bad polling seem to be examples of polling fraud rather than incompetence. It is not that these companies did not understand how to conduct an accurate poll, rather that they don’t appear to have been motivated to do so.
It seems to me that accurate polling is quite a well understood problem. Legitimate polling companies exist that are reasonably good at it. In many cases I don’t think there is much value (from a truth seeking perspective) in the poll data but I think it generally answers the question “what percentage of people give answer Y to question X?” fairly well. That’s just not a very useful piece of data in many cases.
The two examples you linked of bad polling seem to be examples of polling fraud rather than incompetence. It is not that these companies did not understand how to conduct an accurate poll, rather that they don’t appear to have been motivated to do so.
It seems to me that accurate polling is quite a well understood problem. Legitimate polling companies exist that are reasonably good at it. In many cases I don’t think there is much value (from a truth seeking perspective) in the poll data but I think it generally answers the question “what percentage of people give answer Y to question X?” fairly well. That’s just not a very useful piece of data in many cases.