College Grad Admits to Fake Polling Operation That Fooled Pols and Press

A 21-year-old recent college graduate, Rahil Prakash, has admitted to single-handedly creating a fictitious polling operation whose fabricated election surveys fooled campaigns, journalists, and political observers across three states.“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Mr. Prakash told The Guardian. “And as it turned out, it could.”Mr. Prakash built Median Strategies, an anonymous polling website, using artificial intelligence. Between August 9 and mid-August 2025, the site released fabricated surveys covering the Los Angeles mayoral race, Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, and Nevada’s governor’s race. He said he ran the operation entirely alone and denied receiving any payment or trading on prediction markets based on the bogus data.The fake polls spread quickly. In Los Angeles, Median published a survey showing Mayor Karen Bass leading a City Council member, Nithya Raman, by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of their November runoff. Ms. Bass’s campaign amplified the results on X, posting, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!” — citing Median Strategies as the source. The post was later deleted. The California Post, a publication affiliated with the New York Post, ran a headline declaring that “Spencer Pratt’s voters could be deciding factor in LA mayor showdown according to latest poll.”In Wisconsin, a Median poll showed progressive candidate Francesca Hong leading the Democratic gubernatorial primary by more than 20 points. Hong ultimately lost the race. A fabricated Nevada poll putting the Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, five points ahead was also picked up by a popular polling aggregator on X.The operation unraveled after a reporter from the Los Angeles Times began asking questions. Median abruptly shut down and withdrew all its polling, describing the project in an unsigned statement as “a short-term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”Mr. Prakash said he was initially inspired to test the theory following a significant polling miss in Michigan’s Senate primary, where polls had shown Abdul El-Sayed with a commanding lead over Haley Stevens — a lead that evaporated on Election Day.“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” Mr. Prakash told The Guardian. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”The incident has rattled political operatives and raised fresh concerns about polling integrity ahead of the 2028 presidential primary cycle. “Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” Democratic strategist Lis Smith told The New York Times. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”Mr. Prakash issued an apology to those affected. “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong for this,” he said, adding an ominous warning: “If one person can do this, what can a serious operation do in the future?”

College Grad Admits to Fake Polling Operation That Fooled Pols and Press

College Grad Admits to Fake Polling Operation That Fooled Pols and Press

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