Was California's Election STOLEN?

For a moment, Republicans were riding high in the LA mayoral election. But then the mail-in ballots showed up. Now the DOJ is investigating California. Are we looking at a massive case of voter fraud? Or is something else going on? Welcome to America Uncovered. I'm Chris Chappell. Last week, something strange happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. On election night, Spencer Pratt of MTV's The Hills fame was in a firm second place, right behind current mayor Karen Bass. It looked like he and Bass would advance to the runoff election in November. Then, over the next six days, something changed. Mail-in ballots started coming in on top of the already slow counting process. And with those new batches, Pratt's lead shrank. By Sunday, June 8, Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman overtook him. Pratt fell to third place and was locked out of November's runoff. Now the DOJ is investigating California's voter rolls. Trump is calling it a rigged election. And everyone's asking, what the heck just happened? Well, the first thing we learned is that you should never bet on elections. At least in California. If gambling's your thing, stick to the ponies. At least you don't have to wait an entire week to find out you lost. And if gambling isn't your thing, you should check out this episode's sponsor, Investing.com, which is made for people like me who want to invest their money wisely. Let me show you exactly how I use their Investing Pro tool, step by step. When you look at the thousands of stocks available to trade, there's an overwhelming amount of information out there. Like which stocks are undervalued, which ones have geopolitical risk, and which ones have long-term potential. It's almost like you'd need some sort of advanced intelligence to sort through it all. And that's where Investing.com's ProPix AI comes in. It can help you pick winners before Wall Street does. The first thing I do is open ProPix AI. 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So instead of just hoping your team wins, use InvestingPro to help you make a profit. And right now, InvestingPro is running a flash sale. You can get InvestingPro with up to 55% off, and with my link and my code, AmericaUncovered, you get an extra 15% off stacked on top. It's the best price you'll see. And this ends on June 18th. So click the link in the description and use the code AmericaUncovered to lock it in. Alright, so back to LA. Let's start with Nithya Raman. She's a Los Angeles City Council member and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the same organization that just put Zoran Mamdani in the mayor's office in New York City. In 2020, she became the first DSA-endorsed candidate ever elected to the LA City Council. Since then, the DSA has built a real political machine in LA, with four council members now affiliated with the organization, reflecting the left's growing strength. And now Raman is headed to a November runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. Pratt officially conceded on June 12th. And the conservative sphere, including President Trump, did not take this quietly. On Truth Social, Trump wrote, Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had. Third world nation rigged elections. Elon Musk piled on, posting that combining no voter ID with mail-in voting means fraud is de facto legalized. And conservative influencer Benny Johnson wrote that after five days of statistically impossible ballot drops, Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Spencer Pratt. So the question that needs asking is, is it statistically impossible? Well, like everything on this show, it's complicated. California is one of eight states that sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters. And most Californians use them. In the state's recent elections, nearly 90% of voters cast their ballots by mail. Election officials must receive it, sort it, check the voter's signature, separate the ballot from its envelope, and prepare it for tabulation. These facts alone tell you why California elections take an excruciatingly long time. And here's the structural dynamic that explains the blue shift we saw happen. Republicans in California are more likely to vote in person on election day. Those ballots get counted first. Democrats are more likely to mail their ballots in. And so they get counted last. So when Pratt was in second place on election night, we were seeing the Republican votes. The Democratic votes just hadn't been counted yet. And this isn't something new. California changed its ballot harvesting rules in 2016. And Democrats have used that to rout Republicans in the state ever since. Still, there were some specific claims which had gone viral, including one that a batch of ballots had included votes for Rahman, but zero for Pratt. This was investigated and debunked by Trump's Justice Department. It turned out the update had been split across two systems, one minute apart. Every candidate, including Pratt, received votes. So the social media posts got that math wrong. Still, the DOJ has opened multiple election fraud probes in the state. And predicts that people will be charged over discrepancies in California's voter rolls. And this is worth taking seriously. Not because of the Pratt race specifically, but because of what the audit is actually targeting. California's Motor Voter Law automatically registers eligible people to vote when they complete certain DMV transactions, unless they opt out. But at one point, that system added non-citizens to the registration rolls due to a programming error. The DOJ and US Attorney Bill Asale say they've been trying to audit California's voter rolls for over a year, long before Spencer Pratt even ran for anything. Whether ineligible registrations translated into actual fraudulent votes is one part of the broader investigation. That's a separate question from whether the Pratt race was stolen, but it's the more important one. And when we're debating the validity of this or that election, we're kind of losing the forest for the trees. Even if every single one of those mail-in ballots is completely legitimate, that doesn't mean the system itself is working well. A democracy where the winner of an election can't be determined for a week after voting ends is a democracy with a trust problem. It doesn't matter if the process is technically legal. When voters watch a candidate's lead evaporate over six days of drip-fed ballot updates, they're going to ask questions. And when the answers require a graduate-level explanation of signature verification timelines and postmark laws, you've already lost most of them. There's also a practical argument that has nothing to do with fraud. Every day the count drags on is another day bad actors, foreign and domestic, have to inject doubt into the results. California's system doesn't just create the appearance of vulnerability. It creates a prolonged window where that appearance can be exploited, amplified, and weaponized. The 2020 election showed us exactly how that plays out nationally. And California seems to have learned nothing. Whatever the intent behind the rules, the effect is a system that sows mistrust in elections. And unless something changes, this is going to happen every single time. What do you think? Was this a rigged election? Or just California being California? Leave a comment below. I do read as many as I can. And you already track what's happening in the world more closely than most investors do. Investing pro is how you turn that into actual decisions instead of just watching it happen. Click the link below to lock in that 55% flash sale discount plus my extra 15% off with the code AMERICAUNCOVERED. This flash sale won't last long, so grab it while the link is still active. Once again, I'm Chris Chappell. See you next time.