Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass shared a poll on social media last week that showed her leading Nithya Raman by about 12 percentage points; the poll was later found to be fabricated and subsequently retracted.

Many campaigns and outside groups have been releasing polls with limited methodological detail, making it difficult for voters and journalists to assess their reliability.

The poll was posted by Median Strategies, an organization that described itself as a short‑term social experiment and later admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the results were not based on real data. The company did not disclose its founders or purpose and shut down its website after the admission.

Campaign spokesman Alex Stack said the campaign deleted the post after learning the poll was false and defended the action by stating it was reported by multiple news outlets. The campaign also called for any bad‑faith attempts to influence elections to be investigated.

Independent poll aggregators, including The New York Times and FiftyPlusOne, said they excluded the poll because it lacked basic information about methodology and the organization behind it.

Republican pollster Chris Wilson, who leads EyesOver, noted that the ease of creating numbers that appear legitimate has increased, giving campaigns and outside groups incentives to promote favorable but unverified data.

Prediction market activity showed modest price changes for Bass on platforms Kalshi and Polymarket after the post, though trading volumes remained low.

Median Strategies said all previously published poll releases had been withdrawn and should not be cited as genuine data.

Motives for the fake poll remain unclear; the organization did not respond to inquiries about its leadership or the purpose of the experiment.

The episode underscores the need for greater transparency in polling and highlights the challenges of verifying election‑related data in a landscape with many competing sources.