Republican candidate Spencer Pratt was never going to be the next mayor of Los Angeles, a city where 70% of voters chose Vice President Kamala Harris over President Donald Trump in 2024. But Pratt did have a shot at beating Trump’s 26.5% of the vote, an accomplishment which would have secured him one of the top two spots and pushed him into the general election.
On election night, it seemed as though Pratt had done just that, collecting 30% of the vote compared to Mayor Karen Bass’s 35% and City Councilwoman Nithya Raman’s 22%. But California does not have an election day, it has an election month. As more and more mail-in ballots were counted, Raman caught up and passed Pratt, 27.1% to 26.7%. What was a 40,000-vote Pratt lead on Wednesday morning turned into a 3,000 Raman advantage by Sunday night. And by Monday night, Raman’s lead expanded to over 20,000 votes, ending Pratt’s campaign.
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“On Election Night, we will have a good picture of the outcome of most contests,” Sec. of State Shirley Weber said before election day, “but it will take weeks to know the final results. This is normal.”
No, it is not normal. Not normal in other states or other countries. Just the dreadful norm in dysfunctional California. California is a unique global outlier in its inability to deliver fast and fair election results, and it is not a matter of incompetence. The state has specifically designed its voting system to both take nearly forever to count votes and make it easier at every step of the way for bad actors to influence vote totals.
For starters, unlike almost every advanced industrialized democracy, California does not require photo identification to register or vote. The vast majority of the public believes voters should have to show identification to vote, but not California Democrats. Anyone with so much as a gym membership card can get a ballot and vote in California, and that is just the beginning of how ridiculous the system is.
Once a person has been added to California’s voter rolls, they are automatically sent a ballot every election, whether they request one or not. These ballots can be sent to outdated, inaccurate, or unattended addresses — they often are — where they may be intercepted, misused, or returned by someone other than the intended voter. California does not check its voter list against the Social Security Administration death records or its own state welfare and public assistance lists, meaning it is easy for dead voters and illegal immigrants to stay on the rolls.
The state ostensibly requires vote counters to match the signature on a ballot envelope with the signature on file, but the signature matching system is a complete joke. State law specifically says the presumption is in favor of all signatures being valid, and to reject a ballot only when differences are “multiple, significant, and obvious” beyond a reasonable doubt.
California further incentivizes bad behavior by allowing third parties to collect, transport, and turn in ballots for other voters. Campaigns are even allowed to pay people to harvest ballots in this manner, just as long as they are not paid per ballot. This means it is legal for campaigns to register homeless people to vote, help them fill out their ballot, and then turn it in. California Democrats wouldn’t even consider this tactic fraud, they would just call it “normal.”
While many states require ballots to be delivered by election day, California requires only that they be mailed by election day, meaning it could be days after an election before votes are even received, let alone counted. Even then, late-arriving ballots don’t even need an election day postmark: all they need is some evidence on the envelope that “otherwise indicates” the ballot was sent on or before election day. This is why a week after election day, Los Angeles is still counting tens of thousands of ballots.
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California Democrats argue with a straight face that their permissive voting system of no photo identification, mass ballot mailings, partisan ballot collection, weak signature verification, and endless ballot reception are needed to maximize voter “access” to the ballot box. But all their system really does is enable bad actors and sow chaos and commit fraud.
Elections must not merely produce winners. They must also engender public confidence that the result reflects lawful votes cast by eligible voters on time. California has completely failed that basic democratic test.
