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Fake polling from mysterious company highlights danger of unvetted election surveys
Median Strategies admitted the Los Angeles poll was fake after Bass’s campaign shared it, highlighting how unverified surveys can spread before fact-checking.
- On social media last week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass shared a Median Strategies poll showing her leading the mayoral race by about 12 percent; she deleted the post after the survey was revealed as fake.
- Median Strategies admitted Monday that the purported results were fake, stating it created the project as a "short-term social experiment" to examine how unverified polling information spreads without independent verification.
- Within fifteen minutes of Median's post, the price of a "yes" contract on Kalshi regarding Bass winning the mayoral election rose two cents, moving from about 63 cents to about 65 cents.
- Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack stated "any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated," while major aggregators including The New York Times excluded the data due to lacking transparency about methodology and ownership.
- Veteran Republican pollster Chris Wilson said the proliferation of fabricated polls makes it "never been easier to make invented numbers look legitimate," warning that campaigns have every incentive to amplify favorable data before verification occurs.
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Associated Press News+5 Reposted by 5 other sources
Fake polling from mysterious company highlights danger of unvetted election surveys
A mysterious political firm admitted to fabricating multiple election polls this month. The fake results from a company called Median Strategies, none of which appeared in AP coverage, claimed to evaluate support in the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin, the gubernatorial race in Nevada,
·New York, United States
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Total News Sources6
Leaning Left3Leaning Right0Center3Last UpdatedBias Distribution50% Left, 50% Center
Bias Distribution
- 50% of the sources lean Left, 50% of the sources are Center
50% Center
L 50%
C 50%
Factuality
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