The Guardian reported on August 21 that a 21-year-old American recent graduate built a website and used it to publish multiple fabricated election polls. These figures were widely shared and cited by authoritative media in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.
The site, called “Median Strategies,” reportedly shut down quickly and pulled all its polling data after the Los Angeles Times reached out for comment earlier this week.
A brief anonymous statement was then posted on the site, framing the whole thing as a “short-term social experiment” to see whether bogus polls could “slip into the political information chain and keep spreading without any independent verification.”
The site’s creator, Rahil Prakash, told The Guardian in a phone interview on the 20th: “I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily. Turns out, they absolutely can.”
Notably, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cited Median Strategies’ data—which showed her leading her main rival by over 10 points—and the California Post also shared the same numbers.
A popular poll aggregator account on X also shared the group’s Nevada data; however, several reputable polling outfits declined to include Median Strategies’ numbers in their averages because they couldn’t verify the methodology.
Prakash said he never expected things to blow up so fast: “I never thought California political media would pick it up on their own.”
During the interview, he publicly apologized to the campaign teams of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong.
Raman is set to challenge Bass directly in November’s LA mayoral race. Hong had already lost the Wisconsin gubernatorial Democratic primary earlier this month, despite Median Strategies having claimed she led by over 20 points. The site also cooked up a phony Nevada poll showing Governor Joe Lombardo up by 5 points heading into the general election.
When asked what motivated the project, Prakash pointed to a major polling blunder in Michigan’s Senate primary. In that race, pre-election surveys showed Abdul El-Sayed with a commanding lead over Haley Stevens—but while El-Sayed ultimately won, his actual margin was far narrower than the polls suggested.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Median Strategies’ X account started posting on August 9, and by the morning of the 20th, it still had only about twenty followers.
Prakash reflected: “I think my biggest takeaway is that if you make a poll look even slightly polished, it spreads like wildfire. I hope this serves as a hard lesson to take these things seriously. If one person can pull this off, imagine what a well-funded operation could do.”
Prakash said he used AI to build the website, and that he created Median Strategies entirely on his own.
On the 19th, before The Guardian reached out to Prakash, the American Association of Political Consultants had already condemned the stunt. The group stated: “Publishing fabricated survey data as independent research is not a social experiment,” calling the project “a deceptive act targeting voters, the press, and campaigns that rely on public data to make decisions.”