I guess they’re just going to shrug and say, “Our bad.”

From HuffPo:

Stanford, Dartmouth Apologize For ‘Deceitful’ Montana Election Experiment

The presidents of Stanford University and Dartmouth College are sending 100,000 letters to Montana residents disavowing election mailers that state officials called deceitful and worried will influence the state’s two Supreme Court elections.

The mailers were sent last week by political science faculty members at the universities conducting a research project. The mailers rated the four nonpartisan Montana Supreme Court candidates in next week’s election as liberal or conservative on a scale that compared them to President Barack Obama at one end and former Gov. Mitt Romney at the other.

Their use of the state seal on the mailers caused state officials to worry about the effects of an official-looking document that injected partisan politics in a nonpartisan race.

The letters by Dartmouth president Philip Hanlon and Stanford president John Hennessy dated Tuesday apologized for the mailers and said no research study should risk disrupting an election.

“We genuinely regret that it was sent and we ask Montana voters to ignore the mailer,” the letter said.