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Pratt has run an impressive campaign and will probably make it to the runoff given the current margin with the DSA candidate, Raman.
He probably won’t win in the actual election, though. LA’s demographics would make it very hard.
Accounting for demographics, California's heavy Democratic tilt is entirely unsurprising. There's no need to postulate vote fraud (against Republicans, at least), because they're going to lose anyway because of demographic headwinds. You need some other hypothesis to create space for vote fraud, e.g.:
Each of California's demographics are more conservative than the country as a whole, and to get observed California results you need vote fraud to counteract California's demographics' conservative lean.
The country as a whole has levels of vote fraud similar to California, across demographics.
I don't know of anyone who'd argue 1. As for 2, you'd get people arguing for it, but it doesn't make sense then to focus on California; Republicans should instead focus first on states they have any actual power in.
What’s your explanation for why it takes California a month to count votes and later-arriving votes always favor Democrats? Do you think it’s suspicious that late-arriving votes are favoring neither Bass nor Pratt but Raman, the exact outcome needed to knock Pratt out? And do what do you think is a better explanation than fraud for a system that combines no Voter ID with a willingness to mail out millions of unverified ballots?
Mail in voting rules. "Mail-in ballots are valid as long as they are posted by election day and arrive to county election offices by 9 June" And a state law that allowed counties a month to count votes. So they took all month. Google says a recent law changed that to 13 days.
The boring literal answer is they choose this. They could chose not to, as 42 states don't allow this manner of post-marked mail in voting arriving long after election day.
Right, and why did they choose this system….?
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They created a system that easily allows fraud and makes smoking gun proof difficult. When people notice irregularities or things that look like fraud, the supporters of the system demand smoking gun. Instead the opposite should be the presumption — it’s fraud until proven otherwise.
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Ideology. According to the ideology: mail voting good. Therefore, we should do as much mail voting as possible. It's a silly affectation that (reasonably!) decreases confidence in elections, but, again: demographics explain everything about California. If Democrats pushing their supporters to vote by mail results in more Democrats voting by mail, that is unsurprising. Even the strictest voting scheme would still result in Democrats sweeping every statewide election.
To your last question: ideology, again. I agree it creates the potential for fraud. But California Democrats don't need fraud to win by the margins they do. The system is less "we need this to beat the Republicans, who are otherwise on the precipice of victory" and more "we want to show just how dominant we are over Republicans by implementing a voting system they reasonably despise."
Let me try this a different way. Under California law, all of the following is completely legal:
California mails out millions of ballots to a list of voters that is not standardized or verified. You can get a ballot with a drivers license. You can get a drivers license without being a citizen. There is an unknown number of ballots in the ether that correspond to no legal voters. But if those ballots are received at a counting facility, they will be accepted as valid.
Activists and organizers are allowed to harvest ballots on behalf of voters. They can collect ballots and send them in the mail. If you can’t sign for your ballot, then those organizers are empowered to sign your ballot as a witness on a different box.
The only thing, the only thing that would be necessary to transform this into fraud is for some of these ballots to not touch the hands of unique voters. It would require a list of ballots that does not actually belong to likely voters, or access to legitimate ballots. Then you simply fill them out and mail them in. It would take a few people at best, in an environment where there are thousands of organizers whose activities look indistinguishable from fraud because ballot harvesting is legal.
Such election fraud is never investigated or even taken seriously, because that’s a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Really, they created a system that looks indistinguishable from fraud, on purpose, that consistently produces suspicious and convenient results, that nobody ever investigates, that produces conduct identical to that used to steal elections throughout history, that no other secure election system on earth uses. What’s the most parsimonious explanation?
I say it’s fraud!
If they were committing fraud, then, by definition, they would need fraud to win by the margins they do. It’s a tautology.
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It's pretty unsurprising if mail voters vote Democrat.
Why? In this case late-arriving ballots aren’t just favoring Democrats but Raman specifically, which is very convenient!
Edit: and it’s the same for the governor’s race! Results have been called for Becerra at 26.72%. Hilton at 26.38% is uncalled although the next trailer Tom Steyer is at 21.03%. Apparently it’s possible that Tom Steyer will overcome the 300,000 ballot deficit he needs to claim 2nd place, but not the additional 20,000 he would need to claim 1st.
Perhaps because Republicans think that their votes won't count if they mail them in. Perhaps because Democrats put off voting more often in lots of different races.
Do I really need to explain to you that LA is full of pinkos who want to elect a socialist? Do you think it's sus that Mamdani won in NYC? Where did the phantasm of the Based Angeleno come from? I can assure you that Angelenos are not Based.
You’re missing the point: the question isn’t why they lean Democrat by why they lean Raman very disproportionately from how they leaned for bass in earlier batches.
You don’t just need to explain why late votes are Democrat but why they are a different kind of Democratic, and the exact one to bring 3rd place into 2nd to keep an R off the ballot.
If late votes leaned D, but with a propoetion
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This is not an explanation. Late-leaning ballots lean Democratic because Democrats vote late — therefore it can’t be because of fraud. But that’s indistinguishable from election fraud! That’s exactly what it would look like if it were fraud. Fraudsters would harvest late ballots that lean Democratic because that’s how they’re cheating.
Is there any reason for California to accept ballots weeks after the election?
Is there any other state on earth that conducts their elections this way?
Look, they’ve created a system where:
All it would take to steal an election is a political machine to harvest ballots, fill them out, and send them in the mail.it would take a few dozen people. This is literally legal in California because ballot harvesting is explicitly legal and there are rules about it. Ballot harvesters exist. They even have rules about “curing” ballots where you can chase down invalid ballots and have them fixed Ie the organization you would need to commit fraud already exists. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s the literal law. We simply trust, without evidence, that every ballot filled out actually touched the hand of a unique voter.
Come on! This doesn’t bother you at all? You don’t have any explanation at all, except that Democrats happen to prefer voting by mail? Which is exactly how it would look if democrats are using mail to commit fraud.
Ballots break for Karen Bass, right up until the day after Election Day, when they start breaking for Raman. I guess the more left-wing you are the more likely you are to fill in a ballot late. It simply cannot be the case that when millions of ballots are floating around without any security at all that someone is stuffing a few ten thousand into mail boxes. That the results benefit one party the same way every time is a statistical artifact. That no other country on earth conducts elections this way is just a stylistic choice. That the same people who would benefit are the same people responsible is a coincidence. There is no evidence of fraud. Is that really what you believe?
Okay, but it's also indistinguishable from Democrats voting late.
Let me ask you a question. Do you live in a state with vote by mail? Do you vote by mail? Do your Republican friends?
"Harvesting" is a specific thing where people collect mail in ballots and turn them in. I don't like it, but it has to be done, or postmarked, by election day. You seem to be using "harvesting" in a different way that's unclear to me.
Well, no. Fortunately, they don't.
I agree this is bad.
Not really true, the signatures have to match.
This appears to be made up.
I'm not sure what this means.
Curing doesn't allow changing the actual contents of the ballot. Fairly few ballots even go through curing at all. In 2024, 120k ballots were rejected.
This would be pointless since ballots must be postmarked by election day. Or do you believe that USPS is in on this too?
This isn't really true. The proportion of votes in each batch going to Bass is pretty stable. Most batches after the first favor Raman more than Pratt, but not all the time.
You mean, the Democrats? You think it's weird that Californians elect Democrats? Pal, have you been to California?
This is naked special pleading. You seem to be confused about several things about how elections work in California (what harvesting is, how late ballots can arrive, whether they can just be shoved into mailboxes days after election day) - which is understandable since, as far as I know, you don't live here. However, that doesn't prevent you from being sure that the guy you like ought to win the race, and if he doesn't, it's because of FRAUD. If later arriving ballots don't look like the first batch of ballots counted, it's FRAUD. If later ballots should look the same as earlier ones, why even bother counting them? Either they look the same as the earlier ones, and it's a pointless exercise, or it's fraud and they shouldn't be counted.
Are ballot envelopes retained so that this can be verified? Or is it just up to whoever receives it to do a single verification of the postmark date?
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I live in Virginia, where we do have vote by mail. I vote in person, where they at least check my ID, in a district that routinely votes
90% Dem. Among my Republican friends, those less-connected to official party politics they are least likely to vote. I would estimate50% of my friends who are Republicans and regularly opine about politics actually vote. I vote in every election but not out of any principled reason. And I don’t think my vote counts for much. But when I meet so many Virginia and DC Republicans who are in politics, I much prefer truthfully saying I voted to lying or inventing a complicated explanation for why I don’t. My local precinct is cute and it’s a pleasant drive. My boss has never given me a problem about taking an hour to vote. I think there’s a charge code for it but I’ve never asked.I hear all sorts of interesting things from my friends in Virginia politics. A friend who would know swears that Jason Miyares was presented with evidence of Democrats committing election fraud and he balked, saying that allegations like that are exactly what he had to protect Virginia from. Not the activities alleged, the allegations themselves. Obviously this isn’t any kind of proof that amounts to anything, let alone proving anything in a discussion here. I’m just adding this for color.
I know a lot of people with different views about the possibility of mail-in ballot voter fraud. I think most people assume some is happening, but probably not “a lot”. I think that Democrats would keep winning elections without it, especially in California. But I also think that they’re certainly doing some, because it helps them keep their grip on power. It’s the same tendency as unions taking a cut of their members’ wages and donating it to Democrats, who get elected and give the unions sweetheart pensions and deals. It’s been going on a long time. It’s part of Tammany Hall and Ellis Island. It’s how part of Truman and LBJ became VP.
The more of this you allow, the weaker your Democracy gets. California in a meaningful sense is ceasing to be a Democracy. The idea of Democracy is that the people choose in fair and free elections who is supposed to govern them. This is increasingly not how elections are conducted. When you allow ballot harvesting, the edge goes to whoever can spin up the largest political machine. The machine is always present in Democracy when it gets larger than the size of a few thousand Athenians raising hands on the public forum. But when we confuse elections with the ballots cast in those elections, the balance tilts toward the machine. We, informed citizens debating what kind of society we should live in, lose power to whoever can stake out the nursing homes, homeless shelters, welfare ghettos, and immigrant slums. The fraud is just a stalking horse. Democracy is already in trouble before it gets that far.
I’m not especially attached to Democracy, but I think it’s probably a good idea and we should fight for it. I’m not going to lecture anybody about the importance of voting or counting every ballot. But I think that overall it works. The system pioneered in California and spreading to Illinois and Virginia and New York clearly does not work. It gets you corrupt officials who can’t even build a train because everything is looted for parts. Karen Bass is a Communist who was trained in Cuba who allowed a beautiful part of a beautiful city to burn, and she can’t even be voted out of office because Democracy has already degraded to a bureaucratized ritual of hand sanitizing.
To address a few of your other points quickly: signature verification is a joke because nobody knows half the time what a signature is supposed to look like and when a ballot is rejected it can be “cured”; chain of custody means that even after a ballot has been ripped apart so that the voter’s name isn’t attached to his vote, you can prove it started life as a legitimate ballot, and if it’s not done it makes a mockery of postmarking ballots, and it’s frequently never done; postmarking itself is not a sacred human institution, robots aren’t staffing the post office, it would be cheap to fake; and it remains extraordinarily convenient that, after all this, Karen Bass has the same vote share, but Spencer Pratt’s goes down and Raman’s goes up.
If a stack of ballots arrived today, nobody knows from where, and they looked official and had the right postmarks, they would be counted.
If the same thing happened with a stack of $100 bills, your local gas station or 7/11 might accept them. But the FBI would find you, because we’ve made it incredibly difficult to counterfeit. But not for ballots. Ballots are sacred.
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There were two Democratic candidates. Why do the mail-ins support one particular Democratic candidate to a far greater extent than the in-person ballots?
It's fraud. It's obviously fraud.
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Very much an aside, but:
This seems entirely believable to me. At the extreme end, zero-covid loons would all vote by mail and would be overwhelmingly far-left. Very-online far-left agoraphobes would also exclusively vote by mail, which is not true of very-online far-right types (who wouldn’t trust it). More relevantly, far-left PMC types who can’t be bothered to go out to a polling station are more likely to vote by mail. Same for boomer-lib retiree types. Less charitably, dysfunctional zoomer-socialists with self-diagnosed mental illnesses are presumably very likely to send their mail-in votes at the last possible moment. Combine these and similar factors, plus the fact that actual republicans are likely not to trust vote-by-mail systems, and I could easily see a direct correlation between left-wing-ness and propensity for mail voting. I think this is borne out by surveys too, although I admit I don’t remember where I read that.
That doesn’t explain why hundreds of thousands of those ballots wouldn’t be turned in until after the election. It’s very interesting that the 3rd place candidate starts winning the most votes days after the election. Must be one of those statistical correlations. That’s likelier than FRAUD
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Every one of these types sounds like someone who would have had their ballot in the mail weeks ago. I mean, really, we're thinking the HR highlighter girls are just "whoops, three weeks past due" on voting?
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LA's also a serious machine city, significantly more so than Chicago these days, and he's running on a platform of "turn off the money fountain." If you want to survive doing that, your best shot might be to cut deals with some of the unions in advance, and signal loudly that you'll play nice with the money fountain (this is what Trump did). I wouldn't underestimate the chance they "find" enough mail-ins for Raman to knock him out of the runoff, better to have two candidates you know are both committed to the machine.
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