We knew it would probably happen; Pratt would be shut out of the election. The only question is whether the process was fraudulent, and if so what method was used. Although we cannot say for certain, it’s incredibly hard to maintain the idea that the post-Election Day surge for Raman was bona fide; the details point so strongly in the direction of fraud.

In other words, the process gives us the appearance of fraud. That is built into the system, which allows vote-counting of mail-in ballots a week past election day as long as they are postmarked on that day (and “postmarked” is rumored to be interpreted as including a handwritten note), and which features mail-in ballots to everyone on the rolls plus liberal ballot-harvesting.

For example:

California has some of the most permissive — if not the most permissive — vote-by-mail laws in the country. Every active registered voter is automatically mailed a ballot before each statewide election. Because the state has refused to allow the Department of Justice to review its voter rolls, there’s no way to know how many registrations belong to deceased individuals, voters who have moved, duplicate records, or were actually fraudulent registrations to begin with. …

Additionally, California accepts ballots that arrive as late as one week after Election Day. Although the law requires those ballots to be postmarked on or before Election Day, claims circulating on social media suggest that even a handwritten date may be enough to meet that standard, raising further questions about the state’s ballot-counting process. For obvious reasons, this is impossible to confirm.

That time frame is inherently untrustworthy and should never be allowed, unless perhaps for absentee ballots from military personnel. Why would anyone implement a system like that, with so few ways to check on it? Hard to believe it’s for any reason other than to make it more possible to cheat if necessary, once the counters know how many ballots they have to create in order to make up the difference. And with the universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, it’s even more suspect.

So either there was an amazing bona fide surge for the most far-left major candidate in the mayoral race, Raman – hard to believe – or there was cheating here. And the argument made by the left, that late-arriving mail-in ballots in California always go for Democrats, is unconvincing. Do such ballots go disproportionately for Democrats compared to the earlier mail-in ballots? More importantly, do they go for the non-frontrunner – the person in third place? And if so, does the phenomenon occur even when there is no threat from a Republican or a candidate the Democrat establishment doesn’t want – in other words, when there is no reason to manufacture votes? In the case of this LA mayoral primary, there wasn’t so much a late surge for Democrats as a late surge for Raman in particular, the third-place candidate prior to that, and the one who is most to the left.

Because only the top two vote-getters in the California primary advance to the general, if the counters of votes wanted to push Pratt out of the running, they had two choices to eliminate him. The first choice would be to help the frontrunner and incumbent Bass reach 50% and win outright; if a candidate gets over 50% in the primary that person is the outright winner and there’s no further voting. But Bass was about 13 or 14 points away from 50% on election night, so that was probably a bridge too far. Too many votes to manufacture. But Raman and Pratt were only five or six points apart on election night. Much easier to make up that difference and set up an obligatory Democrat/Democrat twosome. And that’s what has happened.

Bass had been consistently beating Raman in the ballots arriving by Election Day. And then suddenly Raman beats Bass in the later ballots. See this:

The big tell about Los Angeles Mayor right now is not that Nithya Raman has gained massively on Spencer Pratt. It’s that she’s gained on Karen Bass *while Bass’ share actually declined* in two full days, Thursday PM to Saturday PM.

Bass and the Normie Dem Adam Miller both dropped slightly in share while Raman essentially took all the net gains.

Thursday Left, this morning Right. Raman gained 3.1 points on Bass. Conventional wisdom was that late voters would’ve consolidated around the incumbent, not bolt for the upstart extremist.

More here:

A candidate who was getting around 20% of the vote is suddenly getting 40% of the vote, and those votes are coming at the expense of Spencer Pratt.

Not her Democrat opponent, whose vote percentage has remained steady.

Not a “Democrat” surge; a Raman surge.

I’m not sure where this guy gets his information, but it’s certainly interesting:

As @BoredElonMusk & the data show, Raman’s late mail in ballot surge was fueled in large part by ballots from Skid Row.

Tens of thousands of homeless whose ballots are sent to central addresses (not the sidewalk) & can be filled out/returned by someone else.

There’s also this:

Many have been asking me describe the potential signature verification loophole for Los Angeles mail in ballots.

It says: “If a voter is unable to sign, the voter can make a mark witnessed by one person.”

Here, the person drew a happy face & “witnessed” it with a scribble. That scribble isn’t validated as being a real person. No name, nothing.

While a happy face may draw scrutiny, a plain line would not.

This could hypothetically enable mass harvesting where the voter never fills out, signs or even sees their own ballot.

We should be told how many ballots show up without the voter’s signature.

A hundred, two hundred years ago, a lot of people couldn’t even sign their name. Today? No excuse for this except in extremely rare circumstances. Combined with ballot harvesting, it’s an obvious travesty. And yet how can the fraud be proven in such a situation? It can only be inferred, but there’s no way to check on who made that mark.

More numbers here:

Mail-ins arriving before Election Day:
– Bass: 38.1%
– Pratt: 27.9%
– Raman: 20%

Mail-ins arriving after Election Day:
– Raman: 37% (+17% surge)
– Bass: 34.9% (-3% drop)
– Pratt: 19% (-9% drop)

In addition:

Add to all this a fact that many have not considered: you don’t even need to manufacture ballots after election day. All you need to know is the approximate results beforehand (Raman comes in third), and fill out the harvested ballots from the homeless, apartment buildings, and fake voters, ensuring that the correct result is overturned after the election is held. You have over a week to get them in, so you can even wait until the polls close and initial results come in and still get that vote counted “legally.” …

Most of the “cheating” can be done legally, save for the actual filling out of the ballots, which is practically impossible to detect. Simply have the harvested ballots ready to fill out when the initial results come in on election night, vote the ballots, and send them in. No magic USB drives necessary. No video trail. No paper trail. No examination of the ballots. …

As far as I can find, which is not admittedly definitive, there is no case where a third-place candidate far back vaults into first place in ballot counts days after the initial results come in. It beggars belief, violates common sense, and depends on the belief that late-breaking voters surged to a candidate everybody knew was rightfully dead and buried. That pattern is never observed in the wild. …

But it is the pattern necessary to kick Pratt off the ballot, giving Karen Bass a clear and easy path to victory over a candidate few people like, and nobody is enthusiastic about, and with the charisma of a rock.

I don’t see any remedy possible for this particular election. One very slight comfort (very slight) is that, if Pratt had been allowed to get on the ballot against Bass in the general, I think it’s highly likely he would have lost the election. I suppose it’s theoretically possible he could have won if he ran an amazing campaign in the next few months. But we haven’t been allowed to find out; it was too dangerous to let us see what he was saying, or to have another debate where he might show Bass up to be a fool. And the Democrats couldn’t even risk the remote possibility of a Pratt win.

However, for the future, there’s this possibility:

The case before the Supreme Court is Watson v. Republican National Committee. The question is direct: When Congress established a national Election Day for federal elections, did it mean ballots must be received by Election Day — or merely mailed by Election Day?

During oral arguments in March, Justice Samuel Alito warned that confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined when the apparent result on election night is later flipped by a large batch of late-arriving ballots.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh likewise pressed attorneys on whether history supports requiring ballots to be received by Election Day. Their questioning reflected broad skepticism from the court’s conservative majority.

Sacramento should be paying attention.

Most Americans understand Election Day to mean the deadline. California’s system tells them otherwise.

When vote totals keep changing for days after the polls close, suspicion naturally grows — because the process looks like it has no real endpoint.

I would say it has no objective endpoint other than 30 days after Election Day. It does have a goal, though – which is to select and then elect the preferred candidates of the Democrat powers-that-be.

The article mentions that, even if SCOTUS decides that Election Day is the final acceptable day for mail-ins, that rule would only apply to federal elections. State and local elections could still use the old method – which means the primary rules for governor and mayor would not change, as far as I can tell.

Once states go this way, it’s very hard to reverse the trend. And that is part of the design.

ADDENDUM:

A similar reversal has been starting to happen in the governor’s race; see this. Will Hilton make it into the general? I submit that it looks better for him than it did for Pratt. I think it’s more difficult to commit enough fraud to matter on the level of an entire state election unless the percentages are very close to begin with. On the state level, there are too many red areas which are not amenable to Democrat vote-counting control, plus the sheer number of faked votes needed is higher. So maybe Hilton will hang in there – although if he doesn’t, it would not surprise me either. It would be third-place Steyer who would have to outperform both Becarra and Hilton as time goes on.