The creator of a fake poll showing Karen Bass with a big lead over Nithya Raman in the Los Angeles mayor’s race has been identified as 21-year-old Rahil Prakash, a recent college graduate.
The purported poll by Median Strategies, which was reported in the California Post and touted on social media by Mayor Bass last week, was later exposed as a sham by The Times. On Thursday, the Guardian identified Prakash as the originator of the poll, using domain registration data tied to the Median Strategies website.
Reached by text that evening, Prakash told The Times that the Guardian’s story was “fully accurate,” but declined to be interviewed or provide more information about himself.
In response to earlier queries from The Times, Median Strategies said via email that the fake poll “was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
Prakash told the Guardian that he was inspired to create the bogus survey after polls and prediction markets showed Abdul El-Sayed winning the Democratic U.S. Senate contest in Michigan by wide margin; the actual vote was much closer.
Prakash also released fake polling data on elections in Nevada and Wisconsin.
The phony poll in the L.A. mayor’s race showed Bass leading challenger Raman, a City Council member, by nearly 12 percentage points.
In its statement earlier this week to The Times, Median said that the poll wasn’t released to influence trading markets — a point that Prakash made in his interview with the Guardian. Experts have said there could be legal jeopardyif there was a financial motive behind release of the poll.
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