WEBSITE BEHIND WIDELY SHARED FAKE ELECTION POLLS RUN BY 21-YEAR-OLD.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”

Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median polling data after it appeared to put her ahead of her election challenger by more than 10 percentage points. 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.

“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” said Prakash. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.”

He added: “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this.”

On the upside, I guess we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving for a few more years:

You can get away with saying lots of crazy things in America today, but "let's cancel Thanksgiving" isn't one of them https://t.co/BT6tWacZJ3

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) August 12, 2026