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.
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.
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 think this is more like putting out fake weather reports than fake corn harvest reports.