Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
California sends mail ballots to every registered voter and allows the counting of ballots postmarked by election day even if they arrive a week later. This process helps explain why the state's vote count is slow. Despite the total lack of evidence for significant cheating, the slow count gives Trumpists an occasion to spread lies about election fraud.
MELANIE MASON, DUSTIN GARDINER and BLAKE JONES at POLITICO:
Rob Quan, the indefatigable Los Angeles politics watchdog, made a prediction on X five days before the primary: “Spencer Pratt will finish election night in first place but he will consistently slide over the next week or two, as later votes are counted, and this website will reach peak dumpster fire status.”
He wasn’t totally right about the first results in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Pratt’s weaker-than-expected showing put him behind Karen Bass from the start. But the dumpster fire? That forecast was spot on.
Social media sites, particularly X, were awash with conspiracy theories about Nithya Raman’s surge since Election Day. By Sunday, Raman had pulled ahead of Pratt by roughly 3,000 votes, making her the heavy favorite to take on Bass in the November runoff — and Pratt’s online fans handled the development much like Quan anticipated.
By now, certain corners of the social media ecosystem have settled, baselessly, on an ironclad consensus: The election was rigged. One widely-circulated claim alleged that a suspicious ballot drop included, improbably, zero votes for Pratt. In fact, the charge stemmed from a misreading of election data that had a one-minute lag in updates, the Los Angeles Times reported. Still skeptics were unconvinced when Bill Essayli, the Donald Trump-picked first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California who said he’s launched “multiple” unspecified election fraud investigations, debunked the claim on X.
Also circling online was incredulity that Raman could possibly be neck-and-neck with Pratt, noting his strong polling in the lead-up to the race. But the last major poll before the election — by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies — showed Raman edging out Pratt, even with fellow Democratic Socialist candidate Rae Huang pulling 9 percent of the vote. Huang’s showing has hovered under 3 percent, indicating that progressive voters rallied around Raman in the closing days.
Much of the argument for a rigged election is based mostly on vibes. Non-Californians who couldn’t fathom why a plurality of Angelenos would back a deeply unpopular incumbent or self-described locals insisting they knew nobody who voted for Raman. The confusion says more about the online echo chamber that Pratt dominated. When Pratt, a Republican, insisted before the election that he’d win 50 percent plus one and win the mayorship outright, his fans believed him — never mind how implausible that would be for a city where 55 percent of voters are registered Democrats and just 14 percent are registered Republicans.
For the last few days, reporters — notably, The New York Times’ Ken Bensinger and CNN’s Elex Michaelson — have been trying, often in vain, to refute falsehoods and explain the precedent of progressive candidates getting a boost off of late votes. (One such example is the roughly 20-point swing that vaulted progressive challenger Eunisses Hernandez over Democratic incumbent city councilmember Gil Cedillo in 2022.) Roxanne Hoge, the chair of the Los Angeles County GOP, has also used social media to provide clear information about the voting process.
But the cheating fixation persists, in no small part because it’s amplified by the most powerful man in the world. Trump said during an interview on Meet the Press on Sunday the California elections were rigged — as well as repeating his baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election being fraudulent — before he abruptly ended his interview with Kristen Welker and walked out. Newsom’s press office declared the outburst “the most severe case of California Derangement Syndrome we’ve ever seen.”
Pratt’s post-election posts have taken a conspiratorial turn. On Friday, he urged his supporters to be patient; by Sunday, he was intimating the late votes for Raman were entirely due to homeless people voting for her.
