If the data was generated for testing and escaped accidentally, why not say that? Their claim that it's last year's data runs directly counter to this perfectly reasonable explanation.
That's a very good point, and of course you flag your test data with a special "TEST" flag.
Now remember the lack of sleep for a week before the election, and imagine a possible bug where your client code somehow fails to put up that big TEST DATA message that you thought was there.
I'm with you on taking the more cynical view on this, but there are plausible explanations. Perhaps they based their testing on 2008 data and just people wouldn't understand the testing process so didn't include that part in the explanation.
