A 21-year-old recent college graduate has been identified as the individual behind Median Strategies, an anonymous website that disseminated widely shared fake election polling data in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California.
Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday that he "wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily." He added, "And as it turned out, it could."
The website abruptly ceased operations and withdrew its polling earlier this week following inquiries from a Los Angeles Times reporter. An unsigned statement on the site described the initiative as a "short-term social experiment" to observe how fake polling "could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and the California Post cited Median polling data. A polling aggregator on X also shared the group's Nevada poll, though some credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median's data due to unverified methodology. Prakash stated he did not expect the California political press to pick up the polls on their own.
Prakash said he used artificial intelligence to create the website and acted alone. He apologised to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong. The American Association of Political Consultants condemned the project on Wednesday, calling it "a deception directed at voters, at the press, and at the campaigns that rely on public data to make decisions."