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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?
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?
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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