What Happened In California?
More MAGA conspiracy mongering
Few things in life are certain, but it’s practically guaranteed that when you read these words, California will still be counting votes from last Tuesday’s primary elections. Yes, I know last Tuesday was last week. They were only half-way done by the end of the week. It’s as if the person in charge of ballot counting is Rowan Atkinson from Love Actually. (Watch below.)
No, damnit, we don’t want the votes gift-wrapped in a special box. We just want the results, as if we’re in a first-world country with a functioning democracy.
By Sunday, it was clear that Democrat Xavier Beccera would advance to the general election. If he faces Republican Steve Hilton, which ensures his victory, Beccera can send Katie Porter flowers. Democrat Nithya Raman overtook Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral race and will face incumbent Karen Bass in November. The below images look as if they were taken immediately when Pratt learned it was all over. Two happy women of color and one very sad white man.
California is a big state and has made a series of big mistakes that has brought us to this confusing, absurd place. California has very generous vote-by-mail rules. According to the California Secretary of State, “vote-by-mail ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received within seven days after the election, as well as any provisional ballots cast, must still be counted.” The state’s election officials have up to 30 days after the election to count ballots, and final results are reported to the secretary of state by the drop-dead-but-maybe-more-like-light-swoon deadline July 3, 2026.
It’s only after polls have closed, that local election workers can begin the arduous process of verifying late-arriving ballots and tabulating them. If a voter’s signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t match what’s on file, the voter is provided the opportunity to come in person to prove their identity.
“On Election Night, we will have a good picture of the outcome of most contests, but it will take weeks to know the final results. This is normal,” Secretary of State Shirley Weber said after polls closed on Tuesday night. Just because something is “normal,” doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
Like most people who take too long to complete assignments, California claims that the tediously slow vote count is because the state prioritizes accessibility and accuracy. I still just want to shout at them, “Move it!” (Watch below.)
Maybe in simpler times, we could’ve sat around, sipping an ice tea on the patio, while idly waiting for California’s election results, but I thought we all understood the horrible fact that Donald Trump is president and will eagerly exploit these delays to promote more election fraud lies.
“The Dumocrats are at it again!” Trump ranted on social media. “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”
He went on: “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”
Trump told reporters at the Oval Office on Thursday, “You see what’s happening in California, they’re rigging the election.”
If Trump is going to accuse Democrats of perpetuating widespread voter fraud in a state with about 23 million registered voters, he probably shouldn’t call them “Dumocrats.” That seems like a complex process, though the most effective vote rigging would have just declared Democratic candidates the winners across the board by midnight. There’s no need for all the drama from a red mirage after polls closed, unless Nithya Raman paid extra for a Project Hail Mary-style climax.
On Sunday, Trump walked out on his interview with Meet the Press’s Kristen Welker when she asked him to provide a shred of evidence to support his election lies. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. I’ve had enough! Thank you, darling,” he said before stumbling away like some decrepit, diseased maniac. Welker pleaded with Trump to stay, pointing out that she’d “traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview.” It’s like a two-and-half hour flight from New York. There’s not even a layover. Trump might act like end-stage Colonel Kurtz, but Welker didn’t take a perilous boat ride up the Nùng River to Cambodia for this interview.
Trump isn’t the only GOP conspiracy theorist who doesn’t need facts when you’ve got instinct. Responding to the above clip from Trump’s unhinged Meet the Press interview, John McCain’s secret daughter Meghan wrote: “For whatever it’s worth, people in my life who have never ever spoken about stolen elections in any capacity are now saying this about California.”
Meghan McCain is a dullard but she’s otherwise powerless. That’s not true of otherse spouting election fraud nonsense. Elon Musk posted on his Klanbake site, “The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud. When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized.” All those billions and it’s still not enough for a single functioning brain cell.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also cast doubt on the results: “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove,” he said. “But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”
Mike Johnson should know, even instinctively, that Spencer Pratt was a Republican running for mayor in Los Angeles, a city Kamala Harris carried 70 percent to 26 percent. Pratt will probably perform about the same as Trump did in 2024, perhaps slightly worse, which is hardly a shock considering Trump’s current approval rating.
So, no, California isn’t “rigging” their elections, and there’s bipartisan consensus that just because the ballot process is embarrassing, that doesn’t make it fraud.
“We might not like how California administers its elections (and I don’t),” Stephen Richer, a former Republican election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, posted on social media. “But that doesn’t make it fraud.”
“For the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Gavin Newsom’s office lamented on social media. Maybe they could tell the governor.
Adding to the confusion is California’s “jungle primary” system. Instead of normal party primaries, every candidate and random crackhead runs in a nonpartisan blanket primary. Proposition 14 appeared on the 2010 ballot and was authored by state Sen. Abel Maldonado, who’d serve a brief term as lieutenant governor (he’s the last Republican to hold the position).
Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — that seemed like a big joke at the time — supported the open primary and argued that it would create more competition in races that Democrats consistently won. Schwarzenegger himself is the last Republican elected statewide in California. Obviously, the jungle primary was seen as a way for Republicans to resist the rising blue tide, but enough Democratic voters bought line about avoiding political “extremism” that Proposition 14 passed. Since then, Democrats have struggled to avoid near disaster, such as when there was serious concern that Democrats could get locked out of the top-two positions that would advance to November’s general election. Consider that if Texas had a jungle primary, James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett would have advanced to the November election.
Coming as a surprise to no one, the jungle primary didn’t reduce political extremism and promote more moderate candidates. Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is MAGA, and while Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt has tried to play it coy, Trump hasn’t hidden his support. Meanwhile, Democrats had shown zero discipline in limiting the number of candidates in major races. Even in a heavily Democratic state, you risk splitting the vote to a potentially fatal level.
If California had normal partisan primaries, Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt would have won their respective ones with absolutely zero chance of winning the general election against any reasonably sentient Democrat. Instead, they both ended election night seemingly in position to advance — Hilton was in first place! — while the incoming ballot drops whittled away their leads. There’s nothing skulduggerous about this: Democrats tend to complete their mail-in ballots later, so the drops will only get “bluer.”
The media doesn’t help matters by insisting on reporting incomplete results as a developing story. Spencer Pratt didn’t have a lead that he suddenly lost. Vote batches that favored him were simply counted first. Nithya Raman didn’t mount a comeback. Those votes in her favor already existed.
Unfortunately, Republicans no longer accept that elections are fair if they lose. Pratt suggested in a social media post that 43,0000 homeless people were somehow responsible for the vote swing against him. Of course, when the GOP’s leaders, including the president and House speaker, freely undermine election results, a gadfly like Pratt won’t mind adding fuel to the fire.
Republicans aren’t feverishly spinning wild Charlie Kelly conspiracy theories over the results in swing states like Michigan or Pennsylvania. This is California, where Democrats overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans. Don’t be surprised if Trump and his corrupt MAGA regime use the results from a mayoral race in Los Angeles as a pretense for their attempts to seize control of elections in November.
So I'm confused, if Democrats are so good at rigging elections, how come the Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the white House?
That would seem to be evidence that Democrats don't rig the elections, at least not effectively, would it not?
If California announced the results ASAP after the polls closed, trump and other cons would whine about the rigged results. That's if Democrats win and the repubs don't. It doesn't matter how long it takes to count votes, or how quickly the votes are counted, cons are going to whine if the results don't favor them. Sure, California does need to make some changes to ensure a quicker count, but that wouldn't placate the whiners.