A bogus opinion poll showing Mayor Karen Bass with a wide lead over City Councilmember Nithya Raman in the L.A. mayor’s race fooled some people — including the mayor herself apparently. But were any laws broken?
The survey by a group calling itself Median Strategies was reported on last week by the California Post and others, and the results were touted by Bass’ account on X.
But after inquiries by The Times, Median Strategies admitted it was all a fake, claiming it was a “social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem.”
A campaign spokesperson for Bass subsequently issued a statement saying that “bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Quinn Yeargain, a professor of the law of democracy at Michigan State University College of Law, said Median’s intent would be a decisive factor in determining whether any laws were broken.
If the fake poll was truly a social experiment meant to test the poll literacy of media outlets and campaigns, Yeargain said, there would likely be nothing to prosecute.
But if the goal was to affect markets — some have speculated that the aim was to influence prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket to affect the odds on bets in the mayoral race — then that could be considered fraud, Yeargain said.
“At a high level what we’re talking about is a lie that is meant to get people to act to their detriment. … We would classically describe that as fraud,” Yeargain said.
Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, said both the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the U.S. Department of Justice would have a potential interest in investigating whether the fake poll was created to affect prediction markets.
“If I were an investigator, I would look for a pattern of trades in markets like Kalshi and Polymarket,” Levitt said, hastening to add that there is no evidence of that at the moment.
“If the intent was not financial gain by depriving others, then it’s almost certainly not illegal — although not everything that is a big problem is illegal,” he said.
In a statement to The Times on Monday, Median Strategies said that “betting or prediction markets had no connection to the experiment whatsoever.”
Kalshi said it didn’t see a bump in trading in the L.A. mayoral race around the time Median Strategies released its fake poll. Polymarket didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Times first contacted Median Strategies last week, seeking more details about the purported poll it claimed showed Bass leading Raman by 12 percentage points.
Median didn’t respond until Monday, first saying it was shutting down its polling operation, then admitting to The Times that the poll was faked.
Median itself is shrouded in mystery. The group bought its domain name and created a website only last week. It was registered privately, so it is not possible to see who exactly owns the website’s domain.
Christian Grose, a professor of political science at USC, said Median could be trying to move the needle on prediction markets, or simply trying to affect the mayoral electionitself.
“This could just be someone trying to move markets with a fake poll and they’re betting on it. It could be some 23-year-old election Twitter type,” he said.
Michigan State’s Yeargain, writing in the Missouri Law Review in 2020 about fake polls affecting prediction markets, argued that publishing fake polls to influence betting markets was either commodities fraud or wire fraud, or both.
“Lies like this poll are damaging to the democratic process,” Yeargain told The Times. “Undermining confidence in polls and elections and increasing the flow of misinformation, I do think there have to be consequences associated with that.”
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