Election Day returns indicated that Spencer Pratt had easily secured the second position in the Los Angeles Mayor race, and would face incumbent Karen Bass in the general election. But ballots have continued to come in and be counted, and a remarkable number of those ballots have been for the initial third-place candidate, Nithya Raman. So it looks like the runoff election will be between two far-left candidates, and Los Angeles will continue to go downhill.
Conservatives generally assume that the fix was in, and Raman’s renaissance is due wholly or in part to voter fraud. Are they right? Today’s Unleash Prosperity Hotline (which you should subscribe to if you don’t) itemizes several ways in which California’s election procedures are conducive to, and really invite, fraud:
California’s election process and mail-in-balloting is a banana republic sham:
* A voter can return a ballot in any county in California, no matter which county that voter is registered in.
* California legalized ballot harvesting – which allows anyone (not just family) to collect and deliver a limitless number of mail-in ballots – an open invitation to fraud or coercion.
* The state mails ballots to every registered voter, 23.2 million of them. Ballots received by officials up to seven days (!) after Election Day are counted.
* The Postal Service often now doesn’t postmark first-class mail, but If a ballot is received without a postmark after the election it’s counted if the voter has handwritten the date on the envelope.
So yeah, there probably was a lot of fraud. Any time you mail out 23 million ballots, you can expect a considerable number of them to be filled out and returned by someone other than an intended registered voter.
I understand that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles is trying to look into the situation, but the same shoddy practices that make fraud easy also make it hard to prove.
