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Let's get into it:
There's no reason California should take so long to count their ballots. The opportunities for fraud with each new ballot drop seem to increase. Mail-in ballots are accepted up to a week after Election Day. Dates and signatures don't seem to matter much in California, where signatures can be a smiley face and citizenship verification is not required. In fact, the kind of ID a person can use to register to vote includes all kinds of things that are available to non-citizens, like state-insurance cards. There are just no safeguards on these results.
When polls closed on Tuesday and the first results came in, Spencer Pratt was in second place and it looked like he'd face off against incumbent socialist disaster Mayor Karen Bass. But as the days have worn on and ballot drops have continued, feckless City Councilwoman Nithya Raman has slowly but steadily overtaken Pratt and will be the contender to face off against Bass in the fall, meaning that Angelinos will have two do-nothing candidates to choose from.
According to the LA Times, Raman now has 27.1% of the vote to Pratt's 26.7%. On election night, Bass walked away with 34.8% of 63% of the votes counted, with Pratt at 30.4% and Raman down at the bottom with 22.3%. But oh, how times have changed as more votes keep showing up to be counted. When officials started counting the votes, they didn't even know how many votes there were in total.
What's odd is that as the votes keep being counted, Bass hasn't gained any ground. In fact, the LA Times has her at 34.7% of the vote as of Sunday night. That's quite a boon for a candidate who cried on election night and basically conceded the race. But that was, of course, before the machine took over. Raman has been gaining the majority of the votes coming in, which is a bit against all odds, given how the first 63% shook out.
The last tranche has Bass getting 15,691 additional votes, Pratt with 8,489 more votes, and Raman with a whopping 19,096 votes. Someone really wants to see her in second place and Pratt disqualified, and maybe I'm a conspiratorial crazy person (don't quote me on that), but I think it's more the Democratic Party machine than the voters doing the talking at this point. And the voting is not done: apparently there are about 368,000 ballots left to be counted in the City of Angels—some 40% of the LA population.
Trump thinks so too. He called the elections, rigged. US Atty Bill Essayli announced plans to investigate, saying California's election system has "serious structural vulnerabilities," including no voter ID requirements. He and Harmeet Dhillon are also working on "a comprehensive audit of California's voter rolls." All that will likely be too late for Spencer Pratt.
Pratt found the whole thing disconcerting as well. He noted that the "net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday" is a shockingly familiar number. He shared a post that reads: "It's no secret that Los Angeles has one of the largest homeless populations of any major city in the United States. While the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count has shown decreases in the last two years, in 2025 it still found that an estimated 72,308 people experienced homelessness any given night in Los Angeles County, and 43,699 people experiences homelessness on any given night in the City of Los Angeles."
"Every update has benefited Raman to varying degrees," said Paul Mitchell, VP of voter data firm Political Data Inc. The common wisdom is that GOP and conservative voters do this crazy thing where they cast their ballots on time and show up at the polls to vote, while Democrats, says the LA Times, "were believed to have held onto their mail-in ballots until the eleventh hour as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates."
Sure, but there were two GOP gubernatorial candidates to choose from, too, so are they really saying conservatives are just better decision makers? Raman sucks at least as much as Bass does. Both of them put ideology above voter concerns like public safety. They seem to think LA can spend its way out of a homelessness crisis that has cost billions of dollars already, with hardly any results.
It has been so disheartening to see American city after American city fall to socialist, leftist ideological control, where residents are somehow convinced that putting their faith in government is the answer to all society's ills. When we let the government solve all our problems, we become subjects, not citizens, children, not adults, tools of their power, and not independent citizens. I have no idea why anyone would want that, not Angelinos or anyone else.
Libby