Website behind widely shared fake election polls run by 21-year-old
Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’ A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal. The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a
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- #1169
- First seen
- 20 Aug 2026, 21:48 UTC
- Last checked
- 20 Aug 2026, 22:48 UTC
- Version history
- 1 version
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462766fe4565...de1c4f
Publisher layer
Recorded article metadata
- Publisher
- The Guardian
- Country
- England / United Kingdom
- Source published
- 20 Aug 2026, 21:33 UTC
- Source updated
- No update timestamp supplied
- Byline
- Sophie Sullivan, Anna Betts and Sam Levine
- Section
- US midterm elections 2026
Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’ A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal. The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a
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1
Website behind widely shared fake election polls run by 21-year-old
Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’ A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal. The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a
Changed fieldstitlebylinedescriptionTextcontentTextsourcePublishedAtsourceUpdatedAtsectionimageUrltags- Version SHA-256
462766fe4565...de1c4f- Capture SHA-256
76e8d7356901...477545
Interpretation layer
Labels with declared origins
Publisher categories are copied from source metadata. Machine signals report observable wording or format and do not determine truth, intent, ethics, or wrongdoing.
- machine content-type Reported news observable-rules-v1 / 70% rule confidence
- publisher category California rss-category
- publisher category Nevada rss-category
- publisher category US midterm elections 2026 rss-category
- publisher category US news rss-category
- publisher category US politics rss-category
- publisher category Wisconsin rss-category
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Evidence layer
Capture provenance
- Capture ID
- #605
- Observed
- 20 Aug 2026, 21:48 UTC
- HTTP result
- 200 / parsed
- Raw payload
- 478,137 bytes, private gzip evidence
- Collector
- news-ledger/0.1
- Public boundary
- metadata and excerpt