According to a report by the British newspaper The Guardian on August 21, a 21-year-old American college graduate recently created a website and used it to post various fictional election poll data. This data was widely shared and cited by authoritative media in three states: Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.
According to reports, the website known as “Median Strategies” quickly shut down after being questioned by the US newspaper Los Angeles Times earlier this week, and withdrew all the poll information it had published.
The website subsequently posted an anonymous statement, claiming that the entire incident was merely a “short-term social experiment” aimed at observing whether false poll results could “easily infiltrate political information chains and continue to spread without any independent verification.”
Website creator Rahil Prakash said in a phone interview with The Guardian on the 20th: "I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate this ecosystem so easily. It turns out that they can indeed do so."
It is noteworthy that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass once cited poll results showing her leading her main opponent by more than 10 percentage points using the 'median strategy'. At the same time, the California Post also shared the same data.
On platform X, a well-known polling aggregator also shared the organization’s polling data in Nevada. However, several reputable polling agencies did not incorporate the data from the “median strategy” into their reports, as they were unable to verify the methodology used in the surveys.
Prakash said that he had not anticipated the situation would develop so rapidly. "I never thought that California's political media would take the initiative to report on this."
In the interview, he publicly apologized to the campaigns of Keren Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong.
Among them, Rahman will directly challenge Bass in the November Los Angeles mayoral election; while Hong lost the Democratic primary election for Wisconsin governor at the beginning of the month, the “median strategy” had claimed she was leading by more than twenty percentage points. Additionally, the website fabricated false data showing that Nevada governor Joe Lombardo would be leading by 5 percentage points before the November election.
Speaking of the motivation behind launching this project, Prakash said that it stemmed from a significant poll mistake during the Michigan Senate primary elections. In that primary election, polls conducted before the election day showed Abdul El-Sayed leading his opponent, Haley Stevens by a large margin. However, although El-Sayed ultimately won, his lead was much smaller than what the polls indicated.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the 'Median Strategy' platform account began posting content on August 9th. As of the morning of the 20th, its followers numbered only about twenty.
Prakash said, "I believe my biggest gain is that as long as a poll is done in a slightly more sophisticated way, it can be easily spread. I hope this will be a good lesson for us to take seriously in the future. If one person can do this, what can a team of people do in the future?"
Prakash said that he used artificial intelligence to create the website, and that he alone developed the 'mid-tier strategy'.
On the 19th, before The Guardian contacted Prakash, the American Political Consultants Association condemned this action. The association stated, “Using fabricated survey data to publish as independent research is not a social experiment.” It also referred to the project as “a deception tactic aimed at voters, the media, and campaign teams that rely on public data for decision-making.”
