The creator of a fake poll showing Karen Bass with a big lead over Nithya Raman in the Los Angeles mayor\u2019s race has been identified as 21-year-old Rahil Prakash, a recent college graduate. <\/p>\n
The purported poll by Median Strategies, reported in the California Post and touted on social media by Mayor Bass last week, was later exposed as a sham<\/a> by The Times. On Thursday, the Guardian identified Prakash<\/a> as the originator of the poll, using domain registration data tied to the Median Strategies website.<\/p>\n Reached by text that evening, Prakash told The Times that the Guardian\u2019s story was \u201cfully accurate,\u201d but declined to be interviewed or provide more information about himself. <\/p>\n In response to earlier queries from The Times, Median Strategies said via email that the fake poll \u201cwas 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.\u201d <\/p>\n 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 primary in Michigan by a wide margin; the actual vote was much closer. <\/p>\n Prakash also released fake polling data on elections in Nevada and Wisconsin.<\/p>\n The phony poll in the L.A. mayor\u2019s race showed Bass leading challenger Raman, a City Council member, by nearly 12 percentage points. <\/p>\n In its statement earlier this week to The Times, Median Strategies said the poll wasn\u2019t released to influence trading markets \u2014 a point that Prakash made in his interview with the Guardian. Experts have said there could be legal jeopardy <\/a>if there was a financial motive behind the poll\u2019s release. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The creator of a fake poll showing Karen Bass with a big lead over Nithya Raman in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-440569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}