Rahil Prakash says he created fake election polls that spread

Bass touted the data; an X account shared a Nevada poll

The Guardian identified 21-year-old recent college graduate Rahil Prakash as the person behind Median Strategies, an anonymous website that published fabricated polls in Wisconsin, Nevada and California. The site abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a Los Angeles Times reporter. Prakash, who said he made the website using artificial intelligence, told the Guardian that he alone created Median.

The website’s unsigned statement on Monday called the project a “short-term social experiment” intended to test how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.” Prakash said, “I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily.” He added, “And as it turned out, it could.”

Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median’s data after one poll appeared to put her more than 10 percentage points ahead of Raman. The California Post also cited the poll. Prakash said, “Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not. I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”

Prakash apologized for the project’s effects on the campaigns involved. “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this,” he said.

Another Median poll suggested that Hong led the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor by more than 20 percentage points. Hong lost the primary earlier this month. Median also released a fake poll showing Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo up by five points before November’s general election.

A widely followed polling aggregator on X shared Median’s Nevada poll. Several credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median’s polling because they could not verify its methodology.

Prakash said he was motivated to start the project after a significant polling miss in the Michigan Senate primary. Before election day, polls had shown Abdul El-Sayed with a heavy lead over Haley Stevens. El-Sayed ultimately won by a much smaller margin than the polls had suggested.

“This is what inspired me to test my theory,” Prakash said. “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. The Los Angeles Times reported that the account began posting on 9 August.

Prakash said, “I think my overall takeaway was that if you just make it look a bit pretty, it’s rather easy for it to spread.”

The Guardian said it identified Prakash through domain-registration data tied to the Median Strategies website. Reporters then reverse-searched two domain nameservers associated with the site and obtained lists of several thousand other domains using those nameservers.

About 115 domains used the same two nameservers, but only one also used the same domain-name registrar as Median Strategies. Only a GitHub 404 message appeared on that matching website when The Guardian checked. Additional web records tied it to a GitHub profile that included a file with Prakash’s name. The Guardian credited Aaron Zolla with digital forensics work.

Median’s statement said no individual involved with the project received compensation or a financial benefit. It also claimed that the project was not “funded, commissioned or directed” by a campaign, party, media outlet or other outside entity.

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

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

Prakash said he hoped the project would be a lesson about taking seriously what one person could accomplish and what a more organized operation might do in the future.