Late ballots wipe out Pratt’s cushion
Los Angeles once again proved that election night is more of a polite suggestion than a deadline. With roughly 200,000 ballots still left to count, Spencer Pratt’s early lead over Nithya Raman shrank to just 7,494 votes. The latest tally gave Raman 23,514 new votes to Pratt’s 10,336, which erased nearly 21,000 votes of margin from the day before. Karen Bass has already locked up a runoff spot, so the question now is which contender gets the second slot. Pratt, a political outsider who ran on crime cleanup and city accountability, had been expected to stay comfortably ahead before the late-counted ballots started doing what late-counted ballots always do in California, namely changing the story after most people have gone home.
California’s counting rules keep the suspense alive
Critics say the state’s habit of counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day invites confusion, delays results for weeks, and leaves voters to trust a process they cannot see. Supporters call it access. Skeptics call it a very convenient way to keep the scoreboard in motion until the math lands where it tends to land. NBC’s Steve Kornacki even noted on election night that Pratt’s strength came from early and in-person votes, while the remaining mail ballots were likely to lean heavily Democratic and could make up as much as a third of the total vote. That is a long time to wait for a count in a state that loves bureaucracy almost as much as it loves telling everyone else how democracy should work.
Federal prosecutors and local critics step in
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said his office is involved in multiple election fraud investigations with the FBI and set up a dedicated email tip line for Californians who want to report suspicious activity. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Renner was also seen at the Los Angeles ballot processing center watching the count. Pratt posted on X about trying to figure out how votes are counted in Los Angeles, and gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton blasted the state’s mail voting setup as shameful and called California a national and international laughingstock. He said he wants ballots to arrive by Election Day and wants verified mail votes counted earlier so totals can be reported faster and with fewer mystery chapters.
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