21-Year-Old Reveals Himself as Author of Widely Reported Fake Election Polls

AP Photo/NewsBase

A 21-year-old recent college graduate has revealed himself as the person behind a bogus polling operation whose numbers made their way into mainstream news coverage.

Rahil Prakash told The Guardian in a report published Thursday that he single-handedly created Median Strategies, an anonymous polling website that published fabricated surveys of races in California, Wisconsin and Nevada.

“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 shut down and retracted its polling earlier this week after a Los Angeles Times reporter began asking questions about the operation. The site subsequently characterized the project to the Times as a “short-term social experiment” testing whether bogus polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

The fake numbers did, in fact, travel.

As noted by The Guardian, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promoted a Median poll that showed her leading challenger Nithya Raman by more than 10 points, while the California Post cited the survey. Another Median poll purported to show Francesca Hong leading Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary by more than 20 points. Hong ultimately lost the race.

Median also published a fabricated Nevada poll putting Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo five points ahead in his reelection race, which was picked up by a popular polling aggregator on X.

“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 said he built the website with artificial intelligence and operated Median by himself. He denied receiving money for the project or trading on prediction markets based on his fabricated polling.

“I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this,” he said.

The Guardian identified Prakash through domain-registration information and other web records connecting the Median website to a GitHub profile bearing his name.

“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.”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!