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Notes -
Popping the Filter Bubble
Part 1 of what may become an ongoing series
Before @seething_spendcel published their post on the Henry Nowak I had actually started writing a post of my own as it had been easily rank in the top-5 if not top-3 of culture war stories for over a week based on the amount of coverage it was getting yet there had been literally Zero discussion of it here. Now I see @Quantumfreakonomics talking about this being a "Slow news week" and how "The current thing is still Graham Platner" and I am suddenly motivated to bring up another top-3 culture war story that does not appear to have been discussed here.
So let's talk about Spencer Pratt and the Unburning of Pacific Palisades.
For those just joining us Spencer Pratt is an MTV Entertainment executive who got his start in reality TV. He lost his home in the 2025 Palisades fire, and he is currently running for Mayor of Los Angeles. His platform is simple, Karen Bass (the Incumbent) is both corrupt and incompetent. He claims that she has been redirecting funds intended to rebuild the burnt-out neighborhoods to her friends while championing policies that make life worse for ordinary Californians.
Those who pay attention to Right-Wing Twitter are no doubt familiar with the proliferation of AI generated ads like this, and the meme about Spencer Pratt contributing money to his opponent's campaigns so they could run more ads like this.
Anyway the important thing that you need to know is that over the last 6 weeks Pratt has gone from being a complete outsider with a snowball's chance in hell to being neck-and-neck with the incumbent, and then last week just days before the polls officially opened, a miracle occurred Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".
Speaking of "glitches". Californians are famously incompetent when it comes to anything involving voting be it Elections or the Academy Awards, polls in person voting was this Tuesday but with the majority of votes being cast by mail it's unlikely we will have an official result till next week and right-wing tweeters have noticed something interesting...
39.3% vote in…
Karen Bass: 117,579
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
42.4% vote in…
Karen Bass: 130,429
Spencer Pratt: 86,323
0 out off 13,000 votes for Pratt would seem to stretch credulity and Gov. DeSantis is calling Shenanigans
The utterly blasé attitude of California to its comically pathetic electoral dysfunction is very frustrating to me, if not exactly surprising, given the state of the state. Functional democratic systems simply cannot (and indeed do not) take weeks to tally votes. Even if there is no or negligible fraud actually taking place (and I honestly believe that that’s true) the blatant appearance of opportunity for fraudulent elections is itself a serious problem. Part of a democracy is and must be confidence in the system! People need to see that the votes are being counted properly! Especially since this problem only appeared post-Covid, presumably due to lax rules about mail-in ballot postmark dates, the fix cannot be that difficult.
Does the federal government have any leverage to force reform? I know states control their own elections (which I think is right and proper in the US system) but surely there’s a point where this just can’t go on. Will it ever become sufficiently embarrassing such that the functionally one-party state government actually feels pressure to change? There seems to be very, very little motivation even from California voters to fix the system, many don’t even seem to see it as a problem.
Thousands of votes and not a single one for the second largest (to that point) vote getter? Thats just not statistically possible
Someone else downthread says the votes get uploaded in batches per candidate, which makes sense to me, even if it is utterly, ridiculously stupid as a way to do things.
But it wasn’t just Bass that went up. All other candidates but Pratt. Why was he the missing batch?
More than that, the later batches favor Bass over Raman by a far lesser margin than earlier votes did. You can't explain this by Democratic votes coming in later.
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