Over the past week, Americans have witnessed one of the most stunning outcomes in history for a high-profile election. In the contest to decide who will become the next Mayor of Los Angeles, City Councilwoman Nithya Raman stormed from a distant third-place finish on election night and has now secured the second spot in the runoff election this November after a late surge of mail-in ballots returned shockingly high margins of support for the progressive candidate.
The sudden turnaround for Raman, which has come at the expense of anti-establishment candidate Spencer Pratt, has generated plenty of speculation about rampant fraud in California’s election system. Ultimately, however, Los Angeles is in trouble either way.
If Raman is indeed the beneficiary of a massive fraud scheme designed to lock Pratt out of the runoff, then democracy is dead in America’s second-largest city and most populous state. Despite mounting outrage, there is currently no substantive effort underway to challenge the results – meaning that if Democrats are engaged in large-scale cheating, they are getting away with it.
Any concrete evidence of fraud would be difficult to obtain given California’s refusal to allow a federal audit of its voter rolls. But there are nonetheless plenty of suspicious circumstances seeming to support the theory that the election was not on the up-and-up.
By the time the clock struck midnight on primary day (June 2), Raman trailed Pratt by more than 24,000 votes, with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass holding a healthy lead over both candidates. Overall, Bass was winning about 34 percent of the vote, compared to about 28 percent for Pratt and 22 percent for Raman with roughly 64 percent of the vote counted.
Raman was performing so poorly, in fact, that she gave a tear-filled concession speech, apologizing to her family for failing.
But then came the usual flood of mail-in ballots. Over the next two days, Raman won an astonishing 41 percent of the votes counted – nearly doubling the percentage she won from in-person votes on Election Day.
Some ballot drops containing tens of thousands of votes allegedly returned zero for Pratt – a virtual impossibility. Moreover, every single L.A. City Council district showed thousands more voters for mayor than governor – meaning that tens of thousands of people voted for mayor but left their vote for governor blank.
As Pratt himself noted, the swing from election night to when the race was called for Raman by most outlets earlier this week was about 43,000 votes – the same as the number of homeless people in Los Angeles. Raman’s mail-in ballot success was allegedly fueled by votes from Skid Row, the most notorious area of the city for homeless encampments.
The possibility that the Democrat Party machine used mass ballot harvesting and glaringly insecure mail-in voting infrastructure to rig the election is grim indeed. But the prospect that the election was completely legitimate is perhaps just as alarming.
Lost in all the controversy over who came in second was the fact that Bass easily came in first and will be heavily favored in the runoff. We are just 18 months removed from huge swaths of the city burning in wildfires that killed more than 400 people – fires that her government failed to prepare for. Bass was out of the country when the blazes began and has taken zero responsibility for her failures.
Raman was also running to the left of Bass – a woman who trained in terrorist tactics with communist revolutionaries in Cuba during the Cold War. The fact that Raman makes Bass look like the moderate in the race speaks to just how extreme Raman is.
Raman has specifically opposed a bill banning homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools (but became outraged when a fake encampment was set up near her own home in protest), gone on a podcast with radical leftist Hasan Piker who said America deserved 9/11, and led the City Council’s committee on homelessness as L.A.’s homelessness crisis exploded to unimaginable proportions.
If the election was completely legitimate as Democrats claim, it means that Angelenos decided that the best two candidates to be their next mayor are the incumbent who already allowed the city to quite literally burn to the ground and a challenger who has embraced the most extreme elements of her party and been a total failure in office (which is perhaps why Raman came in third in her own district).
While the media tried to portray Pratt as an ally of President Donald Trump and mainstream Republican, he didn’t run as either. His campaign was entirely focused on getting homeless people off the streets and into drug rehab centers, making neighborhoods safe for families, stopping the rampant property crime, and holding the city’s failed leadership accountable. Yet voters apparently rejected that message for more of the same policies that have already made large portions of Los Angeles look more like a third-world slum than a modern American city.
Seen through this lens, the voter fraud scenario might actually be preferable for the L.A. residents who still care about saving their city instead of letting it further decay in a swamp of failed left-wing policies. Either way, it looks like the City of Angels hasn’t yet overcome its demons.
Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
