If California wanted to undermine confidence in the electoral system, they couldn’t do a better job of it.
Here we are, days after Election Day, which capped off Election Month, and Californians still aren’t sure of the outcome of a number of critical races. Not because of razor-thin margins, but because there are still millions of votes left to count.
It’s totally reasonable to be annoyed at the slow speed of vote-counts in California. But because Democrats think higher turnout helps them, they designed the election system in California to maximize voter turnout. That includes accepting mailed-in ballots after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.
This year, with the tumult in the gubernatorial race for Democrats, many Democrats waited much later into Election Month to finally vote. Republicans weren’t as confused given that President Donald Trump endorsed Steve Hilton to be governor, so they voted earlier, either via mail or in-person. Unsurprisingly, initial Election Day counts had a slight conservative tilt, while the later mail has skewed toward Democrats.
This isn’t particularly difficult to understand, but right-wingers seem to be having a hard time with it and are filling the void between reality and their desired outcomes with fantasies of mass election fraud.
The biggest case in point is the Los Angeles mayoral race. On Election Night, with Mayor Karen Bass in first place, Trump-backed Spencer Pratt had a solid lead over Democrat Nithya Raman for second place. As the week progressed, and more votes from later-voting Democrats started to get counted, his lead over Raman shrunk. As of this writing, Pratt is still leading Raman 28.24% to 24.89%, but with every advance of Raman, right-wing pundits have started shrieking about election fraud and stolen elections.
Declared Trump, “The Dumocrats are at it again! 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”
Right-wingers on X began spreading wild conspiratorial claims that anyone with common sense could tell were false.
This post, for instance, was viewed by over four million people: “Spencer Pratt got 0 out of 24,000 votes in a late night LA ballot drop. 0/24,000 A guy getting around 30% support got 0 out of 24,000. Astronomically small probability of happening. Impossible. California no longer even hides it. Doors need to be kicked in.”
Popular right-wing accounts like Libs of TikTok and conspiracy theorists like Lara Logan spread the story. It didn’t matter that this was obviously false. As politics editor Kaitlyn Schallhorn explained, “in actuality, Pratt did receive more votes to his total then — 21,870 more. But there was a ‘lag’ in how the vote data was relayed to media outlets.”
But that hasn’t stopped the hysteria from the right. Serial plagiarist-turned-right-wing-influencer Benny Johnson has been busy telling his millions of followers about election fraud in California. “The public has so little faith in California’s elections that they just assume Democrats are going to dramatically rig it with questionable ballot counting DAYS after Election Day,” he said.
Again, it’s true that California is slow at counting votes. But it’s not hard to understand why given election rules meant to maximize turnout. Nor is it hard to understand why it is that a state that votes 60-40 for Democrats would have yet another election in favor of the Democrats. None of this is complicated, either, and it doesn’t necessarily entail any rigging.
It’s not obvious to me that right-wingers spreading conspiracy theories to the masses are smart enough to know better, but it is apparent that there are millions of people who are mad about things they don’t understand and plenty of grifters cashing in on that ignorance.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com