What happens when you shout “theater” in a crowded fire?
That’s what Abbie Hoffman asked—and Allen Ginsberg explained, as only Allen Ginsberg could—about radical, disruptive response to the chaos around him.
Now, the Guardian is reporting how “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.”
“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.
“This poll was reported on by a news outlet,” a Bass campaign spokesperson said.
Journalists talk about how some stories are “too good to check,” and Prakash certainly proved that.
Independent verification becomes slavish dictation when the priority isn’t to get a story right but to get it fast—and posted on multiple platforms. (The lonely old daily newspaper is pretty low on the list.)
I’m all for political stunts, having perpetrated a fairly big one myself, and praising others (see Binface, Count) but this is different.
Rahil Prakash’s prank doesn’t appear to be gaining much traction, but it won’t be long before more fake—or inflated—polling begets more fake news.
The made-up numbers in Wisconsin made national news, when “Median Strategies,”said that Francesca Hong was leading the primary for Governor by more than 20 points.
But other polls—real ones—showed Hong with a similar lead.
According to pollster Chaz Nuttycombe, her supporters were “just more eager to answer the poll,” and there were a lot of them, particularly the kind that appear on cell phones. This surge of enthusiasm didn’t translate into votes.
Hong’s campaign manager argued that Wisconsin polls overrepresented voters between the ages of 18 and 45, and that twice as many young voters would turn out as came to the polls in 2018 and 2022. That didn’t happen.
The Times has a good story about all this, and you can read it here.1
The experiment came as the number of public pollsters has skyrocketed, with around 30 new pollsters cropping up so far this year. The large number of surveys coming from new, previously untested pollsters has made it increasingly difficult to judge survey quality.
What Median Strategies hoped to accomplish by adding false polls into a saturated marketplace was unclear, even to experts in the field.
“It doesn’t make sense as a social experiment; what are you measuring?” said Mia Costa, a government professor at Dartmouth College. “How do you know who was exposed and who wasn’t? This is just wreaking havoc in an election with real stakes and no real interest in understanding the effects of what you are doing.”
It’s like what I’ve been saying here about voting.
If we want to win Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, we still have to convince more people that in fact, elections have real stakes, change does not happen on their phones, and as Mark Twain said, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts on its boots.”
Or as he almost said, “there are lies, damn lies, and algorithms.”
Though the Times missed what the Guardian found out, that the “organization” behind the poll was just a kid with a website. “Median Strategies did not respond to a request for further comment on the incident.”
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