A guy with a slick-looking website just showed how easily bogus political data can circulate. The Guardian reports that Rahil Prakash, a 21-year-old recent college graduate, created "Median Strategies," an anonymous site that pumped out fabricated polls in key 2026 races in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California—numbers that were then cited by Karen Bass' reelection campaign in Los Angeles, a local outlet called the California Post, and a major polling aggregator on social media, among others. Prakash now says the whole thing was a "short-term social experiment" to test whether fake polling could smoothly slip into the political news stream.
"As it turned out, it could," he notes. Among the surveys issued by Median Strategies, per the New York Times: one indicating that Francesca Hong was leading the recent Dem gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin by 20 percentage points—a race she actually ended up losing by less than a point. Prakash yanked the site earlier this week and admitted to the stunt after the Los Angeles Times started poking around with questions, per the Guardian. Prakash notes that he used AI to build the platform and ran the operation solo, without outside funding or profiting from prediction markets.
He says he has since publicly apologized to candidates whose campaigns may have been affected. The American Association of Political Consultants isn't buying the "experiment" framing, however, calling it "a deception directed at voters, at the press, and at the campaigns that rely on public data to make decisions." Bass' team seems to agree. "Any bad-faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," a spokesperson tells the AP. More here.
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