Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt missing out on the general election is the latest example of voters in a large, Democrat-run city flirting with change but then opting to maintain the status quo. This isn’t even the first time this has happened in Los Angeles. Mayor Karen Bass was elected four years ago over […]
LOS ANGELES — California's plodding, weeks-long tally of mail-in ballots has become Exhibit A in President Trump's campaign to delegitimize the November midterms.Why it matters: Glacial vote-counting in the nation's most populous state has produced a familiar, flammable ritual: Late mail piles up, officials plead for patience, and early Republican leads slowly vanish.Democrats and election officials say the long wait is the price of counting every legal vote, including mail ballots postmarked by Election Day that take days to arrive.Trump and his allies treat the process itself as proof of fraud, without producing evidence of illegal votes.Driving the news: Spencer Pratt, the reality TV star running a viral campaign for L.A. mayor, has become MAGA's latest election martyr after five days of mail-ballot counting erased his grip on second place — and his place in November's runoff.City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who was 8 points behind Pratt in early returns on election night, has dominated the late mail vote and is now on track to claim the second runoff spot against Mayor Karen Bass.Each new batch of ballots has been absorbed into MAGA's post-2020 orthodoxy, with Trump allies casting the routine bureaucratic count as "another" slow-motion heist.Zoom in: Pratt's campaign trained the right to believe L.A. was ready for a political earthquake.His viral messaging on homelessness and the City Hall failures he blames for his house burning down helped convince many Republicans that a celebrity populist could break through in a deep-blue stronghold.In reality, the baseline math never changed: Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 3-to-1 in L.A. County, and Trump's toxic national brand overwhelmed Pratt's effort to run as a local insurgent.But to MAGA audiences primed by Pratt's online momentum and strong election-night position, Raman's late surge looked and felt like a mathematical impossibility. Screenshot via Truth SocialReality check: California's slow count is a well-known feature of state law, despite the choreographed outrage that swarms the state every election cycle.The state mailed every active registered voter a ballot during the COVID pandemic, then made the system permanent in 2021 to maximize access and count every legal vote.Mail ballots count if they're postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days, giving late ballots time to reshape close races — sometimes to the benefit of Republicans.California's GOP has acknowledged this is simply how the state's system works — slow by design, but legal and transparent — while still criticizing its optics and calling for reforms.Between the lines: Trump's crusade against mail voting has seeded a self-fulfilling fraud narrative — one that defined the 2020 election and could plague the midterms if Democrats perform as well as expected.GOP in-person voters drive an election-night "red mirage."Democratic mail ballots produce a "blue shift."MAGA treats the late swing as proof of fraud.The big picture: The local blowup over the L.A. mayor's race is serving as a tactical dry run for a much larger federal offensive against California and other blue states' election infrastructure.Bill Essayli, Trump's top federal prosecutor in L.A., says his office has "multiple" election-fraud investigations underway and has accused California of blocking a federal audit of its voter rolls.Trump has demanded the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would implement strict proof-of-citizenship requirements and override state-level voter ID allowances.What they're saying: "Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove," Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CNN when asked about evidence of fraud in California."But think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here."The bottom line: Six years after Trump poisoned Republican trust in American elections, California is exposing how little has been repaired.
Former co-stars Will Friedle, Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong reunited at the "Boy Meets Doc" screening at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival.
Pete Hegseth's Department of War (DOW) has issued a new listing of religious codes after facing a furious backlash.
Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, announced Monday that 'you're going to see more ICE than you've ever seen in New York City.'
An examination of voter rolls from every county in New Jersey has revealed that many noncitizens had been registered as Democrats despite not being allowed to vote […]
A former New Mexico attorney general is speaking out about how federal prosecutors shut down his state investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's sprawling New Mexico ranch — a property where survivors allege rape, sex trafficking, forced births, and possibly worse.Hector Balderas, a Democrat who served as New Mexico's attorney general from 2015 to 2023, told Scripps News he was deep into building a state case against Epstein in 2019 — and had just returned from interviewing a survivor — when the Southern District of New York called."They were concerned that we were getting parallel interviews from the same survivors they were going to use in an aggressive prosecution as well," Balderas said.He paused the state probe, he said, after then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey promised the DOJ would share evidence and allow New Mexico to pursue state charges later. Neither happened. Federal investigators never executed a search warrant on the property."I think that they absolutely impacted our case, and I don't think that they were forthright, and I don't [think] they were operating in good faith," Balderas said.Now he wishes he'd pressed on alone."We would have absolutely gone alone and bet on the case that we currently had at the time," he said.The stakes couldn't be higher. At least 10 girls and young women have alleged they were groomed or assaulted at Zorro Ranch, Epstein's remote compound about 40 miles south of Santa Fe. Allegations tied to the property include rape, sexual assault of minors, forced births, and eugenics. An anonymous 2019 tip — which the FBI didn't enter into its system until 2021 — claimed the bodies of two foreign girls were buried on the grounds on orders from Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That tip never reached Balderas' office."I'm very angry," Balderas said. "They didn't meet the standard of what a good prosecution team should be working and collaborating with other partners."The ranch has never been searched by federal authorities, though New Mexico state investigators conducted their own search of the property in March. New Mexico reopened its criminal investigation this year after the DOJ released millions of Epstein-related files. A bipartisan legislative Truth Commission announced last week it is issuing 14 subpoenas targeting the Epstein estate, banks, and other entities tied to the late sex offender.Balderas says the answers aren't in what's already been made public."I'm convinced that those answers are not in the documents that have been released," he said. "But they're in the millions of documents that are currently being withheld."
