Are California Elections Fair? | Mike Gatto

People are worried what's happening to elections in California and are there potential fraud. During election day certain candidates win and after election day when the more mail-in ballot votes are counted the results might change in elections. Today we sit down with Mike Gatto who knows the laws in California to see what he's seeing. Increasingly I just come out in favor of the idea that if there is so much distrust in the system it doesn't matter who's winning or who's losing we're all losing. We're all losing. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. Mike it's great to have you on. Welcome back. Great to be here. We want to talk to you about California elections. A lot of people are wondering what's going on. It's been a while now. We've been through the election cycle and especially in LA we had some major changes. The election night the winners are different winners and then things change a couple of days later. Can you tell us what's going on right now? Well the simplest explanation is that California provides a mail-in ballot for every single voter in the state who's eligible and that it takes a lot of time to count those ballots. But the more complicated explanation is that we really have two electorates. There's the electorate that votes on their own accord and votes early and then there's the electorate that votes because someone knocks on their door and says hey reminder there's an election going on. Have you passed in your ballot? Do you want me to hand in your ballot? And those two electorates have a completely different political outlook. Some people say that there's a chance that people filled out these ballots, found them, filled them out and changed the date or backdate them because they're coming after the election. What are your thoughts on that? How hard is it to do that or how easy is it possible to do that? I mean look on a small scale it's possible to do anything. You know naturally some of the percentage of people are going to hand over the ballot completely open. They're not going to have even you know seal the envelope. Some people are going to hand over ballots that are not completely filled out. Some people might even say I don't know how to fill this out you do it. But to do that at a very very large scale on a scale that would affect the election I think is very hard. It's very hard. Again you could argue that if it happens 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times that's too much because those people had their votes stolen from them. And people get brazen to do it again and they might do it in a larger scale if they were able to get if they were able to do 10 a thousand then they're going to do 10,000 next time. Correct. But to see this type of thing you know where if you had thousands of people doing this thousands of times at some point the word will get out. At some point somebody will be prosecuted and that's why I do not believe that it's happening at that great of a scale. People are concerned about fraud to the point that some people might not vote in the future. It's kind of creating these thoughts for people that maybe the elections are not fair in California. Can you explain what's happening behind the scenes from what you are seeing? Sure well what people have to understand and what I'm about to say is something that I can tell you many billionaire candidates don't understand and if you can grasp this point you can understand how our elections are run. There is a big difference between persuasion and turnout and people don't understand that. They think campaigns are all about persuasion. Vote for me because I'm going to solve your problems. No. Campaigns are about turnout and what I mean by that is I think right now if I told you look over there there's two voters. Okay voter number one is a woman she's an elderly woman she's almost 80 years old she drives her little Cadillac she goes to church every Sunday. Voter number two is 19 has purple hair and a nose ring and is wearing a punk rock shirt. You tell me which is a democrat which is a republican. Now the professionals involved in politics most of them in the democratic party I still encounter republicans who don't grasp this. You don't need to go to that voter that 19 year old with purple hair and the nose ring and say vote for the democratic candidate. You just need to go to that voter and say vote. You already know how that voter is going to vote and we've seen campaign after campaign screw up this very basic thing. You've seen billionaires in Los Angeles spend millions of dollars hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince that 19 year old with the purple hair and the nose ring to vote for this candidate. You can't you can't that voter is going to vote based on their personal beliefs. The key thing is not persuasion it's simply turnout. So how does that happen right now so if you look at LA election do you think a lot of people went and knocked on doors and collected people's votes and why didn't they drop it in the same day and can you explain that? Sure so again in my example you know that that first voter the the elderly lady who drives a Cadillac goes to church every week she voted when she got her ballot she knew who she was going to vote for she she passed it in and voted. Those votes were counted very early on election night because they've been sitting at the registrar recorder of voters for two three weeks but that other voter that other voter needed somebody to knock on their door maybe two three or four times and say hey there's an election going on don't forget to vote and increasingly you know in my example right we just used our gut instinct we know that the elderly voters republican the younger voters democrat but what you have to understand is that campaigns now have access to so many different data points powered by artificial intelligence that they in many ways know how you're going to vote better than you might even know and so we're in a situation where campaigns don't necessarily need to knock on your door and persuade you to vote for this candidate or that they just need to turn out the voters that they already know how they're going to vote and that's what we're seeing now in california people don't knock on doors and say vote this way or that they knock on doors and just say vote and that's where the action is it's a matter of turning out your voters not necessarily persuading the few people that can still be persuaded what about karen bass's campaign did they do this going to doors and how did that work for them why is the numbers different from nitya ramans and her her number so karen bass is a very longtime politician she's been in public office for almost 20 years as far as i know maybe even longer she had a very professional campaign but it is entirely possible that they ran out of voters to turn out you know obviously if your base is very very small you have a much smaller group of people to turn out if your campaign has identified in this this big pre-election poll that i talked about if they've identified fewer voters to turn out then you've got fewer people to knock on the doors of but i think that you know nithya raman was backed by the the democratic socialist of america machine which is very very strong in los angeles people don't know this los angeles a couple years ago was like what two votes on the city council away from having a socialist majority people don't understand how progressive los angeles is i think the city is 15 republican roughly give or take and so you know nithya raman had a lot of voters she could work with she had a lot of young socialist voters that her base could turn out and the polls showed different results than what it turned out to be and do you think some people did a lot of this activity in the last few days to go and knock on people's doors and are they grabbing their their votes to take it in because that's legal right in california now correct california has something different than most states we have this thing called ballot harvesting which is legal when i was coming up in politics it wasn't i was in the legislature when that law got proposed i i think i was one of maybe two democrats who voted against it i just personally i have some hesitation with allowing campaigns to touch someone's ballot i believe voting should be private it should be something that you should never feel coerced or pressured in any way and i also think that there's a temptation for people to peek in the envelope for people to throw away uh you know a vote if the person says oh i'm voting for so-and-so and you disagree with that i just think that the temptations are too great and it's one of those things like the parable of caesar's wife uh you know caesar was very famous for saying uh it's not that caesar's wife might have done something caesar's wife must be above all suspicion she must be above suspicion not just not just that she hasn't done something wrong i also think voting should be above suspicion we shouldn't have a situation where people feel like gee could the vote be compromised that itself is bad for democracy so how do you explain this kind of a change because you know spencer pratt was winning at least he would have come the second place like in the mayoral race in la and then the last few days the last people that voted essentially they voted in a complete different way and and the results completely changed how do you explain that well the poll showed clustering they showed all three candidates at about 25 and it showed that it could go you know one or two different directions polls now in the modern world are very much defective because you know for the longest time pollsters were not allowed to call cell phones and younger voters don't pick up junk calls whereas ugly voters oh who's this person called me oh yeah you know sir and that that part of electorate tends to be more conservative um so it's possible that polls were sort of under estimating the youth vote by a little bit and those two percentage points were enough to compel or to propel nithya raman into the runoff but what we saw was there was a massive turnout operation organized by the democratic socialists they're very effective at knowing exactly who's going to vote socialist and they're very effective at going door-to-door and harvesting those votes so if you have you know again that 19 year old with the nose ring and the purple hair and the punk rock t-shirt who lives in an apartment and you know that that person might have some socialist viewpoints it could be because you sent them some mail before and they filled out a questionnaire it could be simply because you have some some ai-powered data based on what websites that person visits it could be because that person wrote a ten dollar check to another socialist candidate all you have to do is make sure that that person votes and if you look at the voter rolls and you see that here's a republican who votes for the last four elections here's a democrat who votes for the last four elections you don't need to tell those people to vote but if you have that young person who's voted in one of the last eight elections but you know they're going to vote for you you knock on the door and you just say vote you don't have to even waste time persuading and that's what most people miss that's what most people miss campaigns spend so much money on persuasion they spend very little on turnout. So do you think in a case like this Nithya Raman's campaign versus Karen Bass's campaign and let's put Spencer aside did the campaigns know who's going to vote for Nithya Raman when they go to that door and oh yeah yeah I mean campaigns campaigns know this either from a combination of data points as I described many campaigns also do what's called identification first you will call a voter two or three times and you'll say hey I'm just calling to find out who you're voting for and if they say I'm voting for Nithya Raman you check that box and you say this is a voter we want to turn out it's perfectly legal it's been done forever it's been done since before there was mail-in voting you essentially conduct a massive poll and you find out who your voters are and then you make sure that those voters vote and the campaigns that do that better tend to win elections when I was younger and most voting was done in person we would call voters and then you know we would once we knew three times that that person said I'm voting for so-and-so and that was our candidate we would go on election day we would see if that person had voted and if they hadn't voted we would call them on election day we'd say hey you know I'm just calling make sure you vote and if by 5 p.m they had not voted we would send a van to their house and say hey let's go vote like come on in we never said who they have to vote for we never said anything we never offered them any money it was just we knew from polling them who they were going to vote for and we took a van to their house and we drove them to the polls now instead of driving someone to the polls you go to their door and you grab their ballot right you say fill it out you know and then you grab it and you mail it in the problem is of course this creates massive distrust in the system could we do it better of course we could of course we could do it better and you can choose essentially you can choose but it's legal to choose who you go to their door and who you don't so you can choose you can find out like if they're voting for your candidate and if they're not voting for a candidate then you don't want to go to of course definitely not the reason that that donald trump won the six or seven swing states in the last election was because his campaign did this and his campaign did it better with all respect than kamala harris they knew who their voters were in some cases they in those states it was a young man who you know lives with his parents but they knew that that 19 year old male was going to vote republican this cycle and they made sure that that young man voted this is what the good campaigns understand it's what the successful campaigns understand and it really is what makes a difference in the winning campaign versus in this now why does this happen at the end how do you explain that in your because the the day of the results is different and then those things will get those ballots will get there later is it because they're doing it at six o'clock or five o'clock in the afternoon and trying to yeah infrequent voters tend to vote later infrequent voters tend to be more liberal infrequent voters tend to be younger again in my example right that elderly lady who goes to church every week she doesn't need to be reminded to vote she's voted every every election since 1938 you know she does not need to be reminded to vote but the younger voter they need somebody to remind them hey don't forget to vote don't forget to vote sometimes campaigns will hold on to those ballots california law says as long as it's postmarked by election day so sometimes campaigns will hold on to those ballots because they don't want to clue in the rest of the world that these people have actually voted and sometimes they want the other campaigns to spend money trying to persuade that voter sometimes they want the other campaigns to take their foot off the gas and say oh we're good more people have turned out who are conservative and progressive but most of the time it is literally just that younger more progressive voters vote later and if you can wait till the very last minute and it's postmarked after election day those votes are going to arrive after the first totals are already published and so those votes then arrive after they're published and they change the outcome quite a bit so you don't see any fraud you think the odds of having fraud in this is not much well i have two unless it's if you somebody some people which is totally legal what's happening right now to look and say you can go collect somebody's vote collect the people you like and then hold their votes and then give it at the last day this is a complex question and i'll give you a complex answer do i think that there is fraud in voting of course there has always been fraud in voting in this country do i think it's massive and wide scale i will answer that with a proverb that my italian ancestors like to give which is two can have a secret if one of them is dead there are no secrets in politics i mean the idea that you would have a thousand people out there committing fraud and collecting all these ballots and doing all this massive fraud and not one person stepped forward and wrote a tell-all book or uh had a change of heart or you know went to church and found religion and felt guilty or got a bounty where someone paid them fifty thousand dollars to tell their story that's hard for me to believe you know i think it's very very hard for me to believe but is there fraud at a like a minor level yes does it affect elections yeah it's not going to affect a national election it's not going to affect a campaign for governor or a campaign for los angeles mayor why is that because the amount of people who would need to participate in the fraud is so vast you would need you know 40,000 voters 100,000 voters to all have a record that they had not really voted but in fact someone had collected their ballot we don't see that you need to have thousands of people collecting these ballots and again somebody would step forward somebody would would post it on instagram whatever but in smaller cities oh yeah there have been people taking pictures of ballots on their bed there have been people stating very clearly that they collected ballots with improper means or intimidation there have been examples of fraud in smaller elections closer elections that have affected the outcome for city council races for for mayorships in small cities but to do it at a very very wide scale i think is very difficult we are seeing these videos and some homeless people that are paid five dollars what about that what i would say is if people are concerned about this and there's a lot of people who are concerned there's a lot of moneyed interests who are concerned with this the thing to do is to look at the number of people who voted it's all public information people can look up when this election is done they can look up they can find out that i mike gotto voted if there's evidence of truly massive tens of thousands of voters that did not vote but the records show that they did in fact cast the ballot um well you know that is something that i'm sure the authorities will prosecute the u.s attorney is a trump appointee if that fraud exists i'm sure he will prosecute but again to have tens of thousands of that type of thing happening i don't know that it happens on that scale it's unfortunate that it happens at all it should never happen and could we change the system to make it that it's more trustworthy yes we could there's many little things we could do there's many big things we could do but i just don't think it's happening at the scale that people expect and so let's say i was in charge of affordable housing and and i will i had helped a lot of people get housing and election time comes and i recommend them people might wonder which candidate is better for the residents in my affordable housing complex and and i recommend them certain candidates what would you say to that happens all the time it doesn't just happen in affordable housing places it doesn't just happen there it happens in adult daycare centers where you have a bunch of senior citizens showing up and it's like gee how should i vote and someone that they trust says you should all vote this way and you'll have that entire block of votes maybe 110 120 people will vote a certain way it also happens at church you know you have pastors getting up and saying vote for this candidates and vote this way this is something that's going to happen in a country with free speech where i have a problem with it is when it veers from mere free speech to something where someone feels pressured when you have a senior citizen who's in a facility and someone's going around and saying give me your ballot i don't want to give you my ballot vote this way i don't want to vote this way that's where i have a problem with it and the challenge is when you have so much of this occurring behind closed doors because mail-in voting is behind closed doors whereas if you show up to a polling place you know like no one can really come in there with you right whereas if you've got a mail-in ballot you don't know who's in that room filling it out right and so there are problems with the system that we there's things we could fix to make it more trustworthy absolutely some people are complaining because they are getting their ballots back and they have their the signatures not matching and i've seen some people posting online something like that it will get corrected like they can send it back how does that work the system in california gives people lots of chances to vote and to correct their vote if it got rejected my understanding is that voters do get notified if their ballot is rejected in most cases there's also campaigns who monitor this type of thing and they they try to help people correct their their ballots look it's a very tedious process i mean you you think about how how many was last time you actually signed something with your full signature but i'll tell you when i registered to vote that was like my full signature back in those days but nowadays you know everything is done digitally i don't even sign credit card receipts anymore right and so people's signatures change over time as we transform from a society that is very much paper and into one that's very much digital there's a lot of things that would need to change i personally think that the most reliable way to conduct an election is in person with a few exceptions but it's in person with paper backups to establish two sources of record one digital one analog but if it's really just a matter of restoring trust in the system that to me has a value it's restoring trust in the system even if there's not widespread fraud we should be working to restore trust in the system do you think we're losing that trust right now that trust is gone that trust was lost in this in 2026 it had been going down for years but what happened in 2026 which is a very divided electorate i mean you know every year it's divided it's it seems like it can't get more divided but we're even more divided and then you had a lot of people being heartbroken combined with some people making irresponsible statements some people making true statements but that trust is gone and i've never seen so little trust in the election process and again i say to my friends who are democrats even if you believe that there's never been voter fraud in the history of mankind and that there's no fraud now what could we do to restore trust that's the question we should be looking at it's not is there voter fraud is it wide scale it's what can we do to restore trust what's the impact of us losing this trust you start to have a situation where the united states which is a country that has been a high trust society a country that has had institutions that are very strong and a country where we have been able to hold our head up high and say we're different from all these other countries where bad things happen on election day we lose all of that and once you lose that it's hard to get back and then you have this other byproduct which is people just don't participate in elections people will start to think that their vote doesn't matter we've talked before about how gerrymandering affects that if people feel like it's all pointless that their vote is just lost in a sea of gerrymandering or in a sea of voter fraud or whatever they think then you have a situation where people are not participating in the process and then you have a smaller percentage of people controlling political outcomes in this country i don't care if that's red or blue my candidate or someone else's candidate if it's california or if it's in florida that is a bad thing we need as many people participating as possible you mentioned the campaigns and these laws that and it seems very crafty to target the people that are going to vote for you and you might get more votes even though your candidate might not be as popular and other candidates or maybe people like other people's policies more why has it become like that why shouldn't people just have better policies and better campaigns instead of trying to squeeze the vote out of everyone i mean to me it's sort of just human nature i mean if you give an example from the 1890s and you sometimes it's easier to look at stuff from history you just imagine that there's an election going on for mayor of new york in the 1890s right and you got the irish vote the german vote and the old new york knickerbocker vote the english and dutch vote right if there's an irish candidate who's backed by tammany hall and he knows that his votes are coming from the irish community he's going to drive his horse through the irish communities with the bullhorn just say hey today's election they vote because he knows that those irish folks are going to vote for him this really isn't that different it's just campaigns savvy campaigns knowing exactly where their votes are going to come from and making sure that those people vote yeah you know in an ideal world you like to think that someone does a public service announcement and they remind in that example the irish community the german community the english community in new york in the 1890s you remind everybody to vote but you know campaigns are not altruistic campaigns are selfish and they want to win and so you know they're going to be turning out the irish vote in that example but again what i always tell my republican friends my my my independent friends and my peace and freedom friends and my friends of all stripes nothing stops you from doing this nothing stops you from going out there and and telling your base to vote as well you know in theory if we have a perfect system an adversarial system you have democrats telling democrats hey today's election day remember to vote you have republicans telling republican voters today's election day come out and vote and may the best person win but i think the mistake and i think what most voters don't grasp and what many campaigns don't grasp is that it's not just about persuasion it's not about who has the better platform the better ideas there's some voters that are never going to be persuaded and in those instances it's just a matter of who's better at getting those people to vote do you think election laws in california significantly have to change and would it be possible for them to change oh yeah and the election laws are constantly evolving i think we started to see this year some anxiety on the part of state lawmakers who are by and large democratic where they have realized that how long it takes to count votes after an election in california has made us the laughingstock of the rest of the country you start to have some realization that there's a lot of doubt in the system and so you start to see legislation where we've mandated county uh officials who count votes to count faster i don't know that those little nibbles at reform are going to move the needle much i think we would probably need some broader reforms to uh to really make a difference but whether those reforms come from the state level or the federal level local level it remains to be seen we have a season for elections right it's kind of like it's a few months right you can vote and and what are your thoughts on that well that's a very good point we no longer have election day in this country right we have election month or in some cases election election summer or election year there's a big risk with that we saw in the governor's race how one candidate was leading the polls and lots of people were backing that candidate and you know had the revelations come out just a few weeks later that candidate could have conceivably banked millions of votes with mail-in balloting because of the way that election day is now spread out there will probably be a candidate in our lifetimes who dies before election day but because so much of the electorate voted by mail that that candidate gets elected and there's a risk when you spread out elections over a month there's a real risk that first of all the campaigns never end second of all uh you know that voters are made some percentage electorate is making a decision without having the benefit of all the info part of the reason elections take a long time to count from what we've gathered talking to the registrars is the fact that the signatures don't match and then they have to go chase the people manually to find them and get them to sign again and do we need to have this voter id or something different to fix to fix this and is there a way for california to count in the same day the only way to address the issue of signatures not matching would be to reduce mail-in voting right because once somebody has cast a ballot and let's say their last name you know trails off or there's something with the signature that doesn't match the person might be 80 years old and the signature on my file might be from 40 years ago the only way to expedite counting that ballot is either just to not count it or to go through this big process that we do now to really make sure that every vote is counted i'm not sure that there's any system unless we have like some type of technology that emerges that can very very quickly match a signature and things like that or if there's some sort of unique pin or identifier that a voter can use the challenge is for me it's really it's really an issue of do we go more mail-in voting or do we go more in-person voting clearly this would speed things up in the counting process do you think the politicians that know how to get the votes in in the mailing ballot do you think they would want to change that to to the in-person or do you think it's very hard for them because they then they have to go back to getting the vans i mean the short answer is of course not i mean if you like the current system and the current system is working for you you're not going to vote to change it if you have a base that is susceptible to people knocking on the door and saying hey just vote and give us your ballot you're going to continue to win elections and you're going to like that system very much and politicians on the other side are we need to change this we need to change this but increasingly i just come out in favor of the idea that if there is so much distrust in the system it doesn't matter who's winning or who's losing we're all losing we're all losing are you concerned about that are you concerned about the future of la and california i am i am concerned about the future of the state i'm concerned about the future of los angeles i see a state where for the first time in history we're starting to lose population we have a deeply divided city we uh the vote totals really show that we have three cities you know three different pockets of the electorate that think about things very very differently i am old-fashioned i believe that the best way to accomplish something is still to develop consensus i realize that that makes me a dinosaur in the modern world i think that the the the the style of both parties the last 10 years has been my way or the highway but you think about it if you can go into any room and you can say hey you know what i came up with a solution that the majority of the room 70 or 80 percent of the people in that room think is a wise solution chances are you've worked really really hard and you put a lot of thought in that solution and chances are that's better for the country than just something that's supported by 20 or 30 percent of any given electorate so how do you think we can get back to that in la well i mean the first step in los angeles is agreeing on the problems i mean you have people who are out who continue to say that some of the biggest challenges we face like homelessness that it's purely a weather issue or it's purely an economic problem there are cities that are as expensive as los angeles that do not have the homelessness challenges we have there are places all around the globe that have weather as nice as los angeles you don't have the homelessness problem we have but you still have a group of people stubbornly saying oh it's just because we have nice weather and it's just because rent is so expensive that is not the issue but i'm not sure that we have consensus on how to move forward on these big big issues that are that i think most people identify are the biggest problem in the city if you were involved in one of these elections and kind of like the parties that are involved and you end up losing how would you deal with this well i think it's important when a candidate loses an election to handle it with dignity i think it's important for a candidate to say uh look we got beat this was not my year this was not my election the voters have spoken if you care about a city or a state you're going to stay involved there's a long list of candidates who have lost elections and come back to uh to go on to great things but i think the election process suffers when a candidate calls into question the election now the interesting thing is look there's gonna be voters watching this and saying gee this is just a democrat complaining about spencer pratt no i'm not i think when trump won in 2016 you had a lot of people on the democratic side making allegations of fraud i spoke out against those when biden won in 2020 you got a lot of republicans speaking out and saying oh it was all because of fraud spoke out against that is there fraud yes is it at a such a large scale that it could affect millions of this and there's this vast conspiracy with space aliens and 20 million people involved no they can't there cannot be a fraud that is that big so then what can i do other than speak out against the people who call into question the validity of elections both sides are guilty of that both sides are guilty of you know being poor poor losers sore losers when you don't like the results oh the game is rigged no you just didn't turn out your vote or no you just had a bad candidate that's the explanation 90 percent of the time and uh you know the the smart campaigns the smart parties learn from the mistakes of the past they don't just spend their time crying about the results you know if you go out and play baseball in the sandlot and you know you strike out three or four times you know you can say oh it's because johnny threw a spitball you can say gee my my bat was too small you can make all the excuses in the world the better athletes go back and they start training they start working really hard to win that next game and that's what i would like to see versus just the complaining people get into politics but a lot of business people successful people come in and then they get out do you recommend people should stay a few times and we've seen in california so many very very wealthy candidates uh you know they assume that success in one realm equals success in another and i always laugh at these candidates right i mean i got the fourth highest gpa in my law school class i like to think of myself as a pretty decent lawyer do i know anything about plumbing no uh you know if if i said that i'm gonna go become a plumber i would need somebody to train me on plumbing by the way i actually do know a little bit about plumbing but uh but but you get the point right um i don't know a lot and you have these candidates who they're like well you know i've i've watched the west wing and i voted in the last elections and i've made a 200 million dollars as a hedge fund guy i know elections no you don't you're gonna get taken advantage of in some cases beaten by some you know third-rate candidate who really has lived elections and knows elections for the whole life you're gonna get taken advantage of by political consultants who want to separate you from those millions that you made at the hedge fund so there's really a lack of humility in those candidates and it really shows in the results they don't listen to advice well they tend to make some very very rookie mistakes that other people who've been involved in politics just don't make so is it hard for people now from outside a political realm to get into politics because of the things you mentioned yeah it's harder but if you approach it with humility you have a chance of succeeding again if i decided right now today i'm gonna walk out of here and i'm gonna open up a mechanic shop now look when i was younger i happen to work on engines a lot i know a lot about engines compared to the average person i can still gap a distributor using matches if you've got non-electronic ignition in your classic car that being said i'm not a mechanic and if i am presuming that i can open up a mechanic shop and be a successful mechanic i better surround myself with people who are looking out for my best interests and who understand that realm very well you don't see that happening with these millionaires and business people who get into politics you see them again and again and again being taken advantage of and not learning the lesson that we talked about at the beginning of the show which is there's a difference between persuasion and turnout and if you're going to spend all your money on youtube ads and commercials and stuff like that great you're going to try to persuade voters who you can never persuade you'd be much better off to just turn out the voters who are you already know are going to vote for you you mentioned that we have a problem in la and that we can't even agree what are the problems and where do you think la is headed i think la is so divided right now that we are headed for a future in the immediate future at least where the lack of unity is going to hurt us and that's because whenever you're tackling a big problem whether it's fire recovery or you know tackling homelessness or preparing for the olympics you need consensus you need somebody who's a consensus builder you need somebody who can work with everybody you need a group of people in the city who agree on the best path forward what the election results show is that we have three different cities in effect you know i looked at the uh the different graphics and someone posted in this graphic of the spencer pratt voters they were largely based in the west side and some degree the san fernando valley and then you had the nithya ramen voters they were based in the the central city areas that are populated by transplants younger voters who live in apartments and then you add the karen bass voters which were largely on the south side of the city and people who were working class and who've been in los angeles for a long time and the fact that there was not much overlap i mean it's something that i'm far from naive but it makes me a little bit sad because again you like to think that people will support candidates who have the best ideas versus just you know affinity voting but it makes it very very hard for whoever is going to be our next mayor to make sure that everybody feels like they're part of this wonderful city what we call home you have to make sure that everybody feels like the city is paying attention to them because when it comes down to it it's not the politician city it's the voter city and everybody should feel like their problems are being addressed and that city hall is paying attention but if you've got such division it's very very easy for people to feel ignored and frankly it's very easy for politicians if they got elected with a very very small base to ignore the two-thirds of the city that did not support them originally mike gatto it was great to have you back on californian center thanks for having me what do you think about the election laws in california do you agree with mike gatto that we need to have in-person voting back let us know in the comments or email me at siamakacaliforniacenter.com we read all of your emails and comments i'm siamak korami this is california center we'll see you next time