Seems like the kind of thing someone should go to jail for. You can't just run a "social experiment" by committing fraud and lying to people, and that's assuming this isn't just an excuse someone came up with once they knew they would be caught.
It isn’t necessarily a crime to lie or do a hoax, and a fake poll by itself is probably well within the lines of free speech. The fraud question comes into it for two possible cases:
1) someone might have paid them to do a real poll and they faked it, which is just straightforward fraud with a clear victim.
2) (the fun one) they might have done it to manipulate political prediction markets, which gets into securities fraud questions.
The correctness of that being... well, a whole 'nother debate. Putting that aside for the moment, CFTC has previously gone after people for fraud.
If we assume gambling about the outcome of an election is "futures trading", then fraudulent election polls are the same kind of criminal activity as someone putting out fraudulent corn-harvest reports when trading corn futures.
i dont know if this would really count as fraud in that case either - its not like they lied about the results of the primary or anything, just influenced it by convincing people to vote a certain way or drop out.
i think this is more like putting out fake weather reports than fake corn harvest reports.
