Friend,
As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said about the election in Los Angeles, “It stinks to high heaven.”
Outsider Spencer Pratt ran a fervent, often entertaining campaign while swimming upstream in the deep-blue current of Los Angeles politics.
And to be fair, no one expected him to pull off a first-place finish in blue Los Angeles. But he SHOULD have finished a strong second. He SHOULD have advanced to the November runoff.
Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass cruised to a first-place win despite the obvious shortcomings of her administration. That’s frustrating but, to be honest, not a huge surprise. Many California voters seem to care very little about competence in choosing their elected officials, as long as the party affiliation is correct.
The race wasn’t so much a contest between Pratt and Bass as it was between Pratt and Nithya Raman, a left-leaning member of the Los Angeles City Council, to see who would advance to the November election.
Raman entered Election Day trailing Pratt by a considerable margin. She even delivered a tearful address to supporters, all but conceding defeat.
Then, something of a “miracle” happened.
As California practiced its now time-honored tradition of counting ballots at a snail’s pace well beyond Election Day, Raman began to pick up steam. Enough “unexpected votes” appeared to move her from a distant third to just enough to edge Pratt out of the contest.
Could her eleventh-hour rise have been legitimate?
Commentator Hans Fiene put it well in an X post:
“Late votes are disproportionately for Democrats” struck me as believable.
“Late votes are disproportionately for whichever Democrat needs to come in 2nd to keep a Republican out of a two-man runoff” is not.
Other commentators added to that critique, pointing to the statistical anomaly of a candidate who polled at 20%, received 20% of the pre-election ballots, and 20% of the Election Day ballots, yet surged to 40% of the ballots counted after Election Day, just enough to sneak past Pratt while everyone else’s ballot percentage dropped, including that of the first-place finisher and incumbent Bass. Election trends don’t behave this way, even when they take forever to count.
Speaking of which, Peru just held a national election over the weekend, and it already has its results. But California will be counting for several more weeks.
California allows ballots to arrive in the mail after Election Day. The Golden State also allows the controversial practice of ballot harvesting, which creates an atmosphere in which election fraud can thrive.
Ballot harvesting is very different from simple mail-in balloting. In ballot harvesting, paid organizers can comb through neighborhoods and collect ballots from voters. Organizers know who hasn’t turned in a ballot yet. A person holding an unfilled ballot is vulnerable to intimidation or deception by a ballot harvester. Even ballots that people weren’t planning to submit can be “harvested” and filled out “on their behalf.”
So what can we do about this?
First, we are praying that the Supreme Court will soon rule in the Watson v. RNC case that Election Day means Election Day—not Election Month. States like California and even Mississippi allow votes to arrive via mail days after Election Day. We need the Supreme Court to recognize that federal law in 1845 clearly established Election Day as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Enough of these shenanigans.
And everything fishy in California is exactly why we need the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act.
CatholicVote is a strong supporter of the SAVE America Act, which would require that only American citizens can vote in federal elections—and that they must provide valid identification before registering to vote in a federal election. The SAVE America Act would reestablish in-person voting only (except for illness, disability, military service, or travel). And states would be required to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.
These are common-sense ideas that are very popular with the American people, but the SAVE America Act is universally opposed by the Democratic Party—and a handful of Republican senators.
California needs election reform that reestablishes trust and transparency in ballot counting.
But given what is at stake, all Americans deserve better.
Go forward bravely,
