OPINION:
Somewhere in America, a recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash is smiling. And honestly? He’s earned it.
Mr. Prakash, all of 21 years old, decided to conduct what he generously called “a short-term social experiment.” The rest of us would call it “making up numbers and watching very serious people lose their minds.”
Armed with nothing but a website, some AI and the boundless confidence that only a person who cannot yet legally rent a car possesses, he invented a polling firm named Median Strategies and started publishing fake election polls. Then he sat back and watched campaigns, journalists and political operatives across three states trip over themselves to believe him.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Mr. Prakash told The Guardian. “And as it turned out, they could.”
The crown jewel of this operation was a Los Angeles poll showing Mayor Karen Bass leading City Council member Nithya Raman by nearly 12 points. It even claimed that 16% of respondents had voted for Spencer Pratt — yes, the reality TV Spencer Pratt — and that 85% of those voters were now backing Ms. Bass.
Ms. Bass’ campaign didn’t just believe the poll; they amplified it, citing the poll on X and saying, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!” The post has since been deleted, presumably along with several campaign staffers’ dignity.
The California Post went ahead and ran a headline announcing that “Spencer Pratt’s voters could be deciding factor in LA mayor showdown, according to latest poll.”
To be fair, once caught, the Bass campaign pivoted with the grace of a cat pretending it meant to fall off the couch. “This poll was reported on by multiple news outlets,” a Bass spokesman told KTLA. “Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Translation: We got fooled, but demand justice against the person who fooled us for the crime of fooling us.
The Raman camp, meanwhile, sharpened its knives. “The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source,” a spokesman told KTLA. “Angelenos deserve a mayor who gets the facts right, communicates clearly, and does the work before announcing the result.”
And here’s the part that should keep you up at night. Mr. Prakash also faked a Wisconsin poll showing Francesca Hong up by 20 points (she lost) and a Nevada poll that a popular aggregator on X happily gobbled up. Three states. One guy. One laptop. The margin of error was, technically, 100%.
Now, the cynical among us immediately assumed this was a scheme to manipulate prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where people bet real money on elections, rather than on baseball or whatever President Trump’s teleprompter operator is up to. But investigators found Mr. Prakash didn’t bet a dime. He did this, it seems, purely for the intellectual thrill and the eternal glory of being right.
Kalshi, for its part, is treating this like a victory lap. “Fake polling is a poignant example of why election markets are so important: they’re a filter for misinformation,” said spokesman Jack Such. “Traders lose money if they act on bad information. While news outlets and campaigns touted the poll as real, the markets barely reacted at all.”
Which is a fascinating argument: Professional gamblers were harder to con than professional journalists.
Not everyone is buying it. “Betting on elections is clearly prohibited under existing law,” said Amanda Fischer of Better Markets. “Goofing around on these markets could impact our democracy, and the consequences are irreversible.”
Here’s the genuinely terrifying takeaway, and Mr. Prakash himself said it best: “If one person can do this, what can a serious operation do in the future?”
What indeed. The 2026 midterms are barreling toward us, and 2028 is looming right behind them. If a lone college grad can make Ms. Bass’ team retweet fiction, imagine what a well-funded operation — Democratic, Republican, or something with a Russian or Chinese accent — could pull off with actual resources.
Democratic strategist Lis Smith put it grimly to The New York Times: “Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory. Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”
A cooked poll factory. For every candidate. The elections of the near future may not be won by whoever’s most popular but by whoever’s best at lying about being popular. Either party could, quite literally, fabricate its way to advantage.
So thank you, Rahil Prakash. You didn’t rig an election. You did something scarier. You showed us how easy it would be.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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