California Under Federal Investigation for Election Fraud

Please ignore the plumes of smoke and the ash raining all around you. There is definitely no fire.

Horror movies really bring out the optimist in a person, don’t they? Because we all know exactly how this is going to go down. The pretty girl—home alone in the big, creepy house—hears a noise. The lights flicker. Sounds like something in the basement, pretty girl muses. We know she’s going to go down there, even though nothing good ever happens in the basement. The movie is called The Killer in the Basement, for crying out loud. Still, we hold out hope that maybe at the last second she’ll run out the front door instead. Maybe she’ll call for help. Maybe her big, burly dad will swing by to show her his brand-new machete. Maybe we can save her by screaming, “Oh, my God, do NOT go into the basement!”

She goes into the basement anyway. She always goes into the basement.

Election nights are a lot like that.

On June 2nd, also known as Election Day—a term that’s increasingly decorative in California—Republican Steve Hilton was leading the gubernatorial primary with 28% of the vote. Democrat Xavier Becerra was behind him at 26%. Democrat Tom Steyer was lagging behind them both with 20%. A Republican was leading in California!

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Karen Bass was leading and Spencer Pratt was in solid second position, with Nithya Raman trailing—and I mean trailing hard—in third. It looked like Pratt was a lock for the November runoff! Another Republican with a shot!

The girl had a weapon, a plan, and backup on the way. The doors were deadbolted. It was broad daylight. Her phone was fully charged. Things were looking up.

You know where this is going.

Five days later, Becerra had overtaken Hilton and secured a spot in November. Hilton was still in second, but Steyer was closing in, with millions of ballots still uncounted and prediction markets putting the odds of Hilton being pushed out altogether at ninety-nine percent.

In the LA mayoral race, Pratt’s Election Night advantage over Raman began shrinking with each new mail drop. By Sunday, he was leading Raman by just 7,500 votes—a notable dip from his earlier 33,000 vote lead. Overnight, she sprinted past him to steal his second place spot.

Those early numbers? Oh, just a red mirage. It happens.

Same movie. Same basement. Same audience screaming at the screen. Same ending.

California, you see, doesn’t have an Election Day. It has an Election Season—a leisurely 30-day window during which mail-in ballots trickle in, get counted, and somehow always manage to favor the same side. Night after night, drop after drop, the gap narrows. The Republican lead evaporates. The Democrat surges by statistically impossible leaps. (In one case, out of a batch of 24,834 votes, not a single one was cast for Pratt. Not one. “Fact-checkers” call it a feed glitch. Mkay.) The basement is a bloody mess.

There’s an official explanation for all of this, and you’ve heard it before: Mail ballots skew Democratic. Late ballots skew Democratic. Here’s the problem with that explanation. It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s been wrong in exactly the same direction, in exactly the same state, in exactly the same pattern, for years. At some point “consistently predictable anomaly” stops being a reassuring explanation and starts looking like a description of a system that someone has figured out how to game.

“A bombshell report released by the non-partisan Transparency Foundation gives California a failing grade on election integrity and declares ‘from its failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists to its refusal to verify the identity and eligibility of voters, California by far has the worst election practices in the nation’,” Reform California wrote in 2023. But I’m sure that’s all been addressed by now.

Probably just a one-off.

I know. Huge states take time! California is expecting about 10 million ballots. Canada sees roughly the same number and manages to hold national elections without making everyone wait until the next moon phase to learn who won. The United Kingdom, with tens of millions more people, routinely counts in a single night. Somehow civilization does not collapse. Why is California the only jurisdiction on earth that needs a 30-day emotional support window to declare a winner?

California itself proved it can move fast when it wants to. In the 2021 Newsom recall, the race was called within about an hour of polls closing. Voters were told at 8:30 p.m. that Newsom would remain governor. Apparently California can count quickly when the outcome protects the sitting Democratic governor. But when late ballots promise to erase Republican leads? Suddenly we’re all expected to appreciate the meditative beauty of the process.

Remember when the BBC reported the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7—the one that was never hit by an alleged plane—nearly an hour before it happened? That’s the exact energy the LA mayoral election is giving. From Day One, Bass was absolutely going to the runoff.

The media acts as if the only race is between Pratt and Raman—and some outlets are already saying even that race is already over. Even though twenty percent of the votes haven’t been counted, a number that could flip the current lineup on its ear.

Even though we know it won’t, anything could happen at this point. Literally anything. Bass could be the unlucky one who doesn’t pick up a single vote this round. She could get every last one of them and clear the 50% necessary to be declared mayor on the spot. (Oddly, while Raman has been raking it in in the mail-in count, Bass’s numbers haven’t budged. Weird, right?) Raman is leading Pratt by just 3,000 votes at the moment and there are more than 100,000 still to be tabulated. He could easily claw his way back onto the board. I mean, it’s almost as if they know how the movie ends or something.

This is hardly flat-earth-lizard-royalty territory. We have undercover video of people being paid to register homeless voters. We have footage of poll workers running stacks of ballots through machines multiple times. We have dozens of voters registered to a port-a-potty in an empty parking lot in Venice Beach. We have evidence of people voting in California elections from Pakistan. We have a 126-year-old woman still spry enough to be casting record-shattering numbers of ballots. We know that Californians have been able to successfully register their dogs to vote. (I wish I were making that up.)

The establishment media, naturally, is doing its best to keep anyone from noticing the tomfoolery. Every time someone points out that the math isn’t mathing, they reach for their favorite phrase: “Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud.”

It’s a neat rhetorical trick. They demand “substantiation” for claims of fraud, while simultaneously making it as difficult as possible for anyone to actually audit the system. Sure, we have multiple active election-fraud investigations, Department of Justice and FBI involvement, and a federal prosecutor physically walking through the Los Angeles ballot-processing facility while millions of votes remain uncounted. (Some uber-optimists even think this is actually a high-level sting operation designed to catch California cooking the books.) But who exactly is supposed to substantiate the fraud claims? The port-a-potty company? The people triple-counting the ballots? The ones who just invited the DOJ’s prosecutor to take a guided tour of the lobby while the ballot harvesting processing happens in a hidden basement somewhere?

Watch it here.

Even if the delay is legal, procedural, and blessed by a dozen clipboards and three acronyms, a system that keeps producing the same plot twist starts feeling like a jukebox that only plays a single song. At some point, “totally explainable” is just a more polished way of saying “please stop noticing the pattern.”

California has another 30 days to finish the job. That’s a month of purgatory where “results” are just a series of narrative-setting updates designed to ease the public into the final, inevitable outcome. Sure, we can pray that now that the DOJ is involved, maybe the horror movie will have a surprise happy ending. (You’ll recall that in 2016, The New York Times gave Trump a dismal 15% odds of winning on election night.) But I wouldn’t hold my breath.