The campaign for Republican congressional hopeful Anthony Mele has admitted it used fake poll results to claim he was the front-runner in his primary race. His campaign says the data was based on an Associated Press "test poll." According to the Associated Press, it uses a random-vote generator to test the election system. The final numbers are not indicative of actual outcomes.

Mele says the campaign was not aware of how the information was generated. Mele and York Kleinhandler are vying for the Republican nomination to run against longtime Democratic incumbent Eliot Engel for the 17th Congressional District seat.

A Mele supporter brought the AP test results to the attention of the campaign after seeing the results during a systems test.