Website behind widely shared fake election polls run by 21-year-old

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”

Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median polling data after it appeared to put her ahead of her election challenger by more than 10 percentage points. The poll was also cited by the California Post. A widely followed polling aggregator on X also shared the group’s Nevada poll, although several credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median polling because they could not verify its methodology.

“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” said Prakash. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”

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

Raman is running against Bass in November’s LA mayoral election. Hong lost the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor earlier this month, after Median suggested she had led the race by more than 20 percentage points. It also released a fake poll showing the Nevada governor, Joe Lombardo, up by five points before November’s general election.

In an interview, Prakash said he was motivated to start the fake polling project after a significant polling miss in the Michigan Senate primary, where polls had showed Abdul El-Sayed with a heavy lead over his opponent Haley Stevens before election day. In the event, El-Sayed wound up winning by a much smaller margin than polls had suggested.

“This is what inspired me to test my theory,” said Prakash. “I was a bit shocked, perhaps at how fast this sort of information can spread.”

As of Thursday morning, Median had about 20 followers on its X account. According to the Los Angeles Times, the account began posting on 9 August.

“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 said. “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 – a real, you know, operation for an organization, country, whatever.”

Prakash, who said that he made the website using artificial intelligence, said he alone created Median.

The Guardian identified Prakash using domain registration data tied to the Median Strategies website. By reverse-searching two domain nameservers tied to the site, the Guardian obtained lists of several thousand other domains also using those nameservers. About 115 domains used the same two nameservers, but only one used the same two nameservers and used the same domain name registrar as Median Strategies.

Only a GitHub 404 message appears on that matching website now. But additional web records tied it to a GitHub profile, which included a file with Prakash’s name.

The lengthy anonymous statement on Monday posted to Median’s website also stressed that “no individual involved with Median Strategies received compensation or financial benefit from the project”, which it claimed had not been “funded, commissioned or directed” by any campaign, party, media outlet or other “outside entity”.

When asked on Thursday whether he had traded on any prediction markets after publishing the sham data, Prakash said: “No, not at all.”

On Wednesday, before the Guardian contacted Prakash, the American Association of Political Consultants condemned the effort. “Publishing fabricated survey data as independent research is not a social experiment,” it said, describing the project as “a deception directed at voters, at the press, and at the campaigns that rely on public data to make decisions”.

Aaron Zolla contributed with digital forensics