Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about the shifting outcome of the Los Angeles mayoral race.
[W]hat I feared most has come to pass in Los Angeles: With 93 percent of the vote now counted, a city dominated by liberal Democrats and socialists has voted to send a former communist and a Democratic Socialist to the mayoral elections in November: incumbent Marxist Karen Bass will face off against DSA Councilwoman Nithya Raman. This of course means that Spencer Pratt, the candidate whose viral campaign raised so many Republican hopes across the nation, misses the cut. …
… The fact that mail-in ballots have shifted the outcome — Pratt was in second place early on Election Day — has led inevitably to charges of voter fraud. How could this ever happen absent cheating?
Very easily. In fact, this has already happened before in a Los Angeles mayoral race: In 2022, Democrat Rick Caruso went to bed on Election Night five percentage points ahead of Karen Bass, only to find himself trailing by seven points when the vote count was done — a twelve-point shift. (He ended up losing to her in November, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.) This is not to deny the existence of any and all fraud in California elections; I assume that any election system as porous (no voter ID!) and completely dominated by activist organizers and union canvassers as California’s is by definition rotten and should be dynamited, cleared away, and rebuilt.
I instead insist on a very precise point: Absolutely nothing about what I’ve seen about California’s vote, from the disgusting snail’s pace of tallying to the immensely blue margins of the day-by-day vote drops, gives me any reason to cry fraud. …
… The nature of the vote in California is extremely predictable nowadays: Republicans overwhelmingly vote in person, either early or on Election Day. Meanwhile — in a state where every resident is automatically mailed a ballot — Democrats vote overwhelmingly by mail and therefore in lopsided numbers relative to the proportion of Republican voters in the state.
