The LA Election Steal

The most incredibly impossible election ever

In 2022, with over $100 million spent on a heavily contested mayoral election in Los Angeles, 646,058 votes were cast in the first round of voting

In 2026, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on an election most people were ignoring, the current totals for the first round is at a staggering 723,472 votes.

And the election isn’t even done yet.

There had been suspicions about an influx of late arriving ballots that put Karen Bass over the top in 2022 and allowed Los Angeles to burn considering that primary turnout in the previous mayoral elections in 2017 and 2013 had been around 400,000. 2026 looks to double that.

It was already pretty impressive when the voter totals rose around 50% in 2022 even as the population increased by less than 3%, but in a truly miraculous event, they’re now about to rise 100% even as the population shrank and even during expected low voter turnout.

All the reporting indicated low early voting in the LA area only to somehow achieve an unprecedented record turnout on behalf of Mayor Karen Bass who, after letting parts of the city burn and then lying about it, enjoyed a 56% unfavorable rating and only a 31% approval rating.

In 2022, Bass had gotten 278,511 votes in the primary. Now, after burning down the city and having the approval rating of a rotten fish, she’s set to blow past her 2022 primary totals.

How does a politician with a 31% approval rating turn out more voters than she did in 2022?

This was already pretty amazing, but then the miraculous really happened when Councilwoman.

Nithya Raman, who spent less time in the city than I did, who had come in third place on Election Day and lost her own district, somehow surged and won majorities of late ballot drops.

Raman began by picking up 40% of late arriving ballots. Sure, we’ve always been told that Democrats benefit from late-arriving ballots because they just can’t be bothered to vote in person or on time, but this was a unique example of the late-arriving ballots benefiting the losing Dem in such a strategic way as to lock out Spencer Pratt: the non-establishment candidate.

The leftist councilwoman doubled her polling numbers in late arriving ballots, she performed better with those late arriving ballots than the Democrat front runner, and outperformed Pratt even while Bass performed just well enough to loosely keep her roughly 35% front slot.

That’s not the kind of outcome that happens organically in a normal election.

The ‘surge’ of late-arriving ballots, which usually boosts the Democrat front runner, instead boosted the Democrat third runner, while making the general election a battle between two leftist Democrats, one of whom supported Communist Cuba, and an even more radical newcomer. More significantly it shuts down Pratt’s critiques of the same broken system.

LA’s last mayoral election in 2022 had a similar enough twist with Rick Caruso, a successful developer, winning both the primary and the general election on Election Day, before more ‘late arriving ballots’ conveniently put Bass over the top.

Caruso went from winning the primary by 5% to losing it by 7% once those ‘late arriving ballots’ showed up. Then he won the general 51% to 49% only to lose it from those same ballots. While Bass lost on Election Day, taking in less than 49%, she picked up around 60% of every subsequent late arriving ballot drop.

That was suspicious enough, especially with turnout somehow up around 50%, but we were told that late-arriving ballots (naturally) favor Democrats, but how does one explain turnout rising by 100% and the late-arriving ballots favoring not just Democrats, but one specific Democrat.

Why would late-arriving ballots behave so differently from all the previous votes that had been cast?

Some have tried to find excuses. They’ve pointed to the one poll that favored Raman. They’ve claimed that she did better with younger voters who voted late. They’ve argued that Democrats were voting ‘strategically’ to box out Pratt. But none of those excuses makes sense. Polls can be wrong, but the poll numbers were reasonably predictive. There was no sign of a surge for Raman anywhere, especially online, where younger voters are more active and reactive. And while the party establishment may have strategic intentions, voters do not cast their ballots ‘strategically’ by voting for a losing candidate on the theory that she would end up in second place out of fear that the candidate they really support might end up losing the election.

The only people who can direct votes ‘strategically’ are the ones who command not individual ballots, but tens of thousands of them, and that is what happened in the mayoral election.

Late voter dumps consisting of harvested ballots and other dubious schemes can be used to make a mockery of elections and representative government, but when ballots are added in such numbers, they distort the overall totals leading to absurdities like voter turnout continuing to increase for Democrat candidates even as the public grows less enthused with them.

Electing Bass in 2022 required faking a massive turnout surge and 2026 has an even bigger surge. As public discontent with the political machine grows, increasingly bigger surges will have to be faked until there will be more voters than there are people living in Los Angeles.

And as the city’s population shows signs of shrinking due to miserable mismanagement by the same political machine rigging elections, that is becoming a very realistic prospect.

Meanwhile with the mayoral race now a contest between two leftists, it will be interesting to see what the turnout numbers for the general look like, and whether one or both sides will perform ballot dumps to change the outcome, and that potential civil war between election riggers will tell us a good deal about who’s rigging elections and how they’re going about doing it.

The lack of any meaningful election integrity means that worthless ballots with no valid signatures can be dumped and counted as long as they put the right people over the top. The ballot dumps for Raman locked out Pratt, but if the Left is serious about replacing Bass with Raman the following months will see an ugly showdown between the city’s top political crooks.

And that may be the only way the machine exposes itself.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.