Spencer Pratt was leading the Los Angeles mayoral race by nearly 21,000 votes over progressive City Councilwoman Nithya Raman — and then California did what California does. The latest ballot dump dropped 19,000 votes for Raman, nearly 16,000 for incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, and just 8,500 for Pratt. Eighty percent of the batch went to Democrats. Pratt went from first to third overnight.
Where have we seen this movie before? Oh right — everywhere in California, every single time a non-establishment candidate threatens to win.
President Trump blasted the state's election system as "crooked," and frankly, he's being polite. When a guy leads by five figures and then a magical batch of mail-in ballots appears where 80% break for his opponents, we're not watching democracy. We're watching a card trick where the dealer already knows what's in your hand.
Raman is now projected to advance to the November runoff alongside Bass, who sits at 34.7% with roughly 250,871 votes. Pratt now trails Raman by more than 3,000 votes with approximately 146,000 ballots still outstanding. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, Central District of California, has already flagged concerns. "We also have serious concerns about how California maintains its voter rolls," Essayli said. His office has set up a dedicated fraud tip email address. That tells you everything.
ABC7 journalist Jory Rand noted Pratt could only come back if "we see a batch in the last couple of days of those mail-in ballots that were heavy on Spencer Pratt." Sure. Because California's ballot-counting operation has been so trustworthy up to this point.
In one earlier batch, Bass gained more than 12,000 votes, Raman gained nearly 10,000 — and Pratt gained exactly zero. Not a few hundred. Not a thin slice. Zero. The LA Times' Kevin Rector explained this away as "a lag in an automated collection of the data in which there was one data collection that captured votes in a single batch of votes for Bass and Raman, and then about 1 minute later, the collection of the rest of that same batch." A glitch. Sure it was.
Look, Spencer Pratt is a reality TV guy who ran as a populist chaos candidate. The political machine wasn't going to let him waltz into the mayor's office in America's second-largest city. That was never going to happen. But the brazenness of it is the point. They didn't even try to make the numbers look organic.
When you're ahead by 21,000 votes and the next ballot dump hands your opponent a 2-to-1 advantage, the system isn't counting — it's correcting. California doesn't hold elections. It holds ceremonies where the pre-selected winner gets confirmed after they figure out how many ballots they need to manufacture the right outcome.
Trump called it crooked. The U.S. Attorney's office is sniffing around voter rolls. And somewhere in an LA County ballot processing center, someone is feeding mail-in ballots through a machine at 2 AM and calling it democracy.
