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”.
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. Most definitely not,” said Prakash.
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. According to the Los Angeles Times, the account began posting on 9 August. 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.
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