Gary Bauer, president of the Christian conservative American Values, has claimed that pollsters have been “cooking” surveys to favor marriage equality advocates.

Appearing on Washington Week, Bauer told FRC President Tony Perkins that a recent poll their groups commissioned proves Americans remain largely opposed to same-sex marriage.

The poll's main finding is that “82 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independents believe marriage 'should be defined only as a union between one man and one woman.'”

“While certainly, particularly among young people, there is some shift on this issue, most Americans still understand that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Bauer said of the poll, which was conducted by partisan pollster Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research.

“I think, Tony, we both agree that there is an effort underway here to use polls not to measure public opinion but to form public opinion and move it in the direction of the demands of the gay rights movement,” Bauer said.

“Absolutely, and a lot of that is done by the way the questions are worded,” Perkins said.

According to the survey, seventy-five percent of GOP voters disagree that “politicians should support the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples.”

Bauer criticized most polls which show a majority of Americans support marriage equality, saying they had been “cooked.”

(Related: Majority of Americans support gay marriage, including 69% of millennials.)

“One would assume if there had been a big shift of opinion, the gay rights movement would say, 'Let's have a national referendum, we'll prove it to you.' But the fact that they will spend millions of dollars to keep [it] off of the ballot in states a reaffirmation of the traditional meaning of marriage, I think is further evidence that they know the polling data, which is often being touted in contrast to the poll we've got today, are really in many cases – the numbers have been cooked in order to advance a particular social agenda,” he said.

Writing at Right Wing Watch, Brian Tashman pointed out that “there is no mechanism in election law or the U.S. Constitution to trigger a national referendum on any issue.”