August 18, 2026 - Fulltext

A federal judge refused to throw out a fraud lawsuit accusing Elon Musk of rigging a $1 million voter payout he publicly promised would be random.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin denied the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's bid Tuesday to have the case thrown out before trial — a motion called summary judgment — on the fraud claim, according to his order filed Monday.

The ruling allows an Arizona voter's proposed class action lawsuit, which could represent more than 1 million petition signers, to move toward trial.

Musk launched the daily giveaway at an October 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, telling the crowd he would pay $1 million every day to registered voters in swing states who signed America PAC's petition supporting free speech and gun rights.

America PAC, the super PAC Musk founded to support President Donald Trump's 2024 presidential run, amplified the promise on X within hours of the rally.

"We're gonna be awarding a million dollars, randomly, every day from now until the election," Musk said at the event, according to the America PAC post.

But days before the Texas lawsuit was filed, Musk's own lawyer admitted in a Philadelphia court that the winners were not chosen at random.

"The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance," the lawyer told a Philadelphia judge on Nov. 4, 2024, according to the complaint. "We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow."

Pitman was unpersuaded by Musk's argument that the word "randomly" was too vague to be proven true or false.

"This argument warrants little analysis," the order said.

"A jury could surely conclude that America PAC's process of reviewing a 'vetting document' to make the 'best selection of someone who ideologically aligned with America PAC' — which included 'everything from criminal background history to age, marital status, children' and social media content — was far from random," Pitman wrote.

The order also found that Musk himself was deeply involved in the program, undercutting his claim that he did not know the selection was not random.

Musk "participated in high-level discussions about establishing America PAC" and "participated in high-level discussions with Young and certain America PAC independent contractors about America PAC's projects," the order said.

The Texas ruling is the latest in a string of legal setbacks for Musk over the giveaways.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 in July to refer Musk to a local prosecutor for possible election bribery charges over similar cash giveaways during Wisconsin's April 2025 Supreme Court race, CBS News reported.

August 19, 2026 - Fulltext

NEW YORK (AP) — Locked in a competitive reelection race, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared on social media last week that a new poll was evidence that her campaign was “gaining momentum.”

Just a few days later, the truth emerged: The poll was fabricated.

The California results were among at least three “polls” across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake. The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it “was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

The post offered no explanation of who was behind the “experiment” or for what purpose.

The trajectory of the California poll offers a cautionary tale about the perils of trusting unvetted polling. While high-quality independent polls still exist, they appear amid a slew of other surveys produced by outside groups, campaigns or super PACs or using undisclosed or questionable methodologies. It can be a struggle to make sense of the findings — and as the latest episode shows, even campaigns may end up falling for falsified data.

“This is much bigger than one fake poll,” said Chris Wilson, a veteran Republican pollster who now leads the public opinion firm EyesOver. “It’s never been easier to make invented numbers look legitimate, and campaigns and outside groups have every incentive to amplify anything favorable before anyone verifies it.”

The Median Strategies fake polls, none of which appeared in Associated Press coverage, claimed to evaluate support in the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin, the gubernatorial race in Nevada, and the mayoral race in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles poll, which purported to show Bass, an incumbent Democrat, leading councilmember Nithya Raman, a progressive Democrat, by about 12 percentage points in the mayoral race, was shared by the Bass campaign on social media and covered by the California Post before it was revealed to be bogus.

The Bass campaign has since deleted its social media post promoting the poll, but defended itself by saying that it “was reported on by multiple news outlets.”

“Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack said.

Transparency is critical for evaluating poll findings

Median’s “findings” were shared by polling aggregation accounts on social media. They were not, however, included in the databases of major independent aggregators, including The New York Times, Real Clear Politics or FiftyPlusOne. 

The New York Times and FiftyPlusOne noted that the polls were released without basic information that was needed for vetting, such as who was running the firm. When they reached out, Median Strategies did not respond to requests for more information.

“When the poll was released, it lacked basic information about how it was conducted and who was behind it,” Will Davis, director of Election Data Analytics at The New York Times, wrote in an email to the AP. “Releasing this type of information is standard practice for pollsters, and because that information was not provided, we did not include it.”

Mary Radcliffe, Head of Research at FiftyPlusOne, also thought the methodology statement for the Wisconsin poll was missing key details, including the source for the voter file the company claimed to have used and the vendor who fielded part of the sample.

Median did not respond to her questions, so the polls were not included in FiftyPlusOne’s database. But Radcliffe noted that her method for screening polls is not infallible.

“There is a universe where they could have come up with plausible answers to my questions,” she said. “This is an industry built on trust. I have to trust that people are answering my questions in good faith.”

While admissions of falsified polling data are rare, they are not without precedent. 

In 2010, for instance, the left-leaning blog Daily Kos said that polling for its website, conducted by a firm called Research 2000, was fraudulent.

But it’s common for pollsters to release polls with minimal information about how the survey was conducted, what questions were asked, or who was behind it. Higher-quality polls rely on expensive methodologies, such as randomized sampling, so many pollsters opt for cheaper solutions. In addition, many election polls are conducted by campaigns or super political action committees with a stake in the outcome of the race. This can leave few — if any — reliable and independent polls to evaluate in contests like midterm primaries.

Before writing about any poll, AP verifies that it meets high standards of transparency and methodological rigor. But even high-quality polls have some amount of error, which underscores the importance of examining each finding with caution.

Prediction markets introduce more complexity

The introduction of prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket gives polls a different significance for people betting on election outcomes. 

The posts about Wisconsin and Nevada drew little reaction and were not accompanied by any discernible movement on the two prediction markets when they were released, but there were some shifts on both platforms after Bass shared the false Median Strategies numbers.

On Kalshi, the price of a “yes” contract on Bass winning the Los Angeles mayoral election rose two cents, from about 63 cents to about 65 cents, within fifteen minutes of Median’s post. On Polymarket, roughly twenty separate accounts traded thousands of contracts in Bass’s favor six minutes after the tweet. 

In the days leading up to Bass’s post about Median, trading on the LA mayoral election had been thin, with a typical trade over that week being under $10. 

While the price movements were small, the concentration of trading on both platforms shortly after the release of Median’s fake poll was not.

Before it was taken down, the Median Strategies website included a statement claiming that “no individual involved held or traded any position in an election prediction market, betting market, or other financial instrument tied to the races covered by Median Strategies.”

Motivations for the fake data remain unclear

More than a week after the firm began sharing “results,” it remains unclear who is behind Median Strategies.

No one responded to AP’s questions sent to an email address listed on its website, which was created little more than a week ago. Before it was taken offline, the only content on the site was a statement indicating that the firm “has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls.”

“All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data,” it wrote.

The firm highlighted what it called “a credibility problem” in its first social media post earlier in the month.

“Polling has a credibility problem. Ours is the fix: no partisan clients, no campaign or party money, numbers that go wherever the data takes them even when it’s inconvenient. Trustworthy polling, rebuilt,” it wrote.

August 18, 2026 - Fulltext

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is calling on administration officials to issue a national emergency declaration regarding election integrity, including a policy to allow the presence of federal immigration agents at polling booths during the upcoming midterms.

Bannon, 72, forcefully floated the idea Tuesday during an episode of Real America's Voice, suggesting that an "up-armored ICE presence" at voting booths in November is critical toward ensuring election integrity. The former White House chief strategist said President Donald Trump should take the bold approach rather than focusing on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which contains plans for voter ID and limits mail-in ballots.

"It's not going to happen," Bannon told conservative commentator Jack Posobiec. "You know why it's not going to happen? Because John Thune and the donors don't want it to happen. They think it's racist, they think it's nativist."

Bannon said many senators, including Thune, treat Trump like a "lame duck" while publicly urging the administration to act.

"This is why we need a national emergency proclamation, a national emergency memo, about the upcoming elections," Bannon continued. "You're going to have to have a forcing function to get to ID. You're going to have to have a forcing function not to have the phony mail-in ballots."

Bannon also called for an "up-armored ICE presence" at polling booths, which critics will say amounts to intimidation, he acknowledged.

"Well, it ain't intimidation if you're a United States citizen," Bannon said. "It's an intimidation if you're a foreigner and here illegally and not eligible to vote. It should be intimidating; we don't want you there. We don't want you near a voting booth. We certainly don't want your votes."

A message seeking comment from the White House was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.

Trump, meanwhile, has remained tight-lipped regarding any plans to declare a national emergency ahead of the midterm elections. He spoke to Wayne Allyn Root last week on Real America's Voice, with the host asking him directly about his intentions.

"Stranger things have happened," Trump said. "I'll leave it at that."

Trump has repeatedly said voter ID and other measures included in the bill, which the Senate has yet to pass, are essential to both election integrity and Republican chances to win in November.

Critics of the proposal say it would block thousands of Americans from voting booths due to lack of identification, including passports. A national emergency declaration linked to elections could also lead to results being challenged or overturned, other detractors insist.

"Donald Trump wants to take over American elections," Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. "Senate Democrats are prepared to combat his unprecedented, illegal efforts at every turn. Your vote belongs to you. We will ensure it stays that way."

A national emergency declaration would not automatically allow the president to rewrite state election laws or impose new voter qualifications unilaterally, election-law experts have said. The U.S. Constitution assigns primary responsibility for election administration to states, while Congress holds significant authority over federal election rules.

Last year, reports surfaced of a draft executive order allowing the president to invoke foreign election interference as justification for emergency measures, but critics say any attempt to impose nationwide voting rules via emergency actions would face significant court challenges.

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's chief legal analyst, previously told Newsweek's The 1600podcast about the ways in which Trump could intervene in the midterms, saying his efforts to curb mail-in voting could hurt Republicans just as much as, or worse than, Democrats.

"To this day, it's unclear which party is helped by mail-in voting," Toobin said. "Going back a decade or two, it was Republicans who all wanted mail-in voting, and some people still think Republicans benefit more by mail-in voting. So some of this stuff is not only pernicious, it is just mysterious."

Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shot down the possibility of immigration agents at polling stations during a briefing in February following an earlier call by Bannon.

"That's not something I've ever heard the president consider," Leavitt told reporters.

Pressed further, Leavitt said she couldn't guarantee that ICE agents wouldn't be present at polls in the fall.

"I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question," she said. "But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question."