A 21-year-old recent college graduate says he was the sole person behind an anonymous polling operation that invented election surveys, dressed them up to look legitimate, and watched as the numbers made their way into news coverage and campaign messaging.
Rahil Prakash told The Guardian that he created Median Strategies and fabricated polling in races in California, Wisconsin and Nevada as an experiment in how easily false political information could enter the bloodstream of an election.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Prakash told the outlet. “And as it turned out, it could.”
Median Strategies shut down and retracted its surveys earlier this week after a Los Angeles Times reporter began asking questions about the organization. In a statement to the Times, the operation described itself as a “short-term social experiment” intended to test whether bogus polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
It did.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promoted a Median Strategies poll showing her more than 10 points ahead of challenger Nithya Raman, while the California Post also cited the survey, noted Mediate. Another fabricated poll showed Francesca Hong with a lead of more than 20 points in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Hong ultimately lost the race.
A third Median poll showed Republican Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo leading his reelection contest by five points. That survey was subsequently picked up by a popular polling aggregator on Twitter, giving the invented numbers another layer of apparent credibility.
“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” Prakash said. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”
Prakash told The Guardian that he built the Median Strategies website with the help of artificial intelligence and operated the project by himself. He said he was not paid for the scheme and denied using the fabricated polling to make trades on prediction markets.
“I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this,” he said.
The Guardian said it identified Prakash through domain-registration records and other web data connecting Median Strategies to a GitHub profile bearing his name.
What Prakash produced was not an elaborate influence operation with a large staff, sophisticated infrastructure or substantial financing. By his account, it was one recent college graduate with a website, artificial intelligence and enough attention to presentation to make invented polling look plausible.
“I think my overall takeaway was that if you just make it look a bit pretty, it’s rather easy for it to spread,” Prakash told the outlet. “And I hope it gives a really good lesson going forward in that we need to be very serious about these things and very serious in how, if one person can do this, what can a serious operation do in the future.”
This year that has been a rash of strange polls, with many accusing the left of pushing fake polls to influence the media and create a sense of inevitability for the DSA candidates running in the Democratic primaries.
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