Spencer Pratt went from being in the Los Angeles mayoral runoff less than a week after election day to facing a three-thousand-vote deficit against Nithya Raman as mail-in and late-arriving ballots continued to be counted, with California law permitting ballot reception for seven days after election day as long as the ballot was postmarked by election day. President Trump walked out of his Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker after a heated exchange in which he called California’s election a dirty rigged election and accused the network of being crooked, while Welker demanded specific evidence and Trump argued the entire system designed to resist verification is itself the evidence.
Scott McKay, publisher of the Hayride, senior editor of the American Spectator, and author of the novel Blockbusters, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what is happening in California and what, if anything, can be done about it.
McKay said he does not think California Republicans or anyone at the state level can do much at this point. This is a Justice Department matter now. His starting point for understanding California’s election integrity situation is the Carter Baker Commission report of 2005, which he described as the gold standard set of recommendations on the subject, whose two central conclusions were that voter rolls must be kept clean and that mass mail-in balloting is incompatible with maintaining election integrity. California has ignored both principles for a very long time.
On the specific arithmetic that concerns him, McKay noted that Raman was sitting at roughly twenty-four percent on election night and has since been receiving approximately forty percent of newly counted ballots, a surge with no apparent natural constituency behind it. He said the people who calculate statistical probability describe that kind of shift as essentially impossible under normal conditions, something on the order of eleven trillion to one against. He said Raman does not have the political infrastructure or apparent sophistication to orchestrate this herself, and his suspicion is that the government unions and their affiliated organizations decided they wanted a specific general election matchup and engineered it, because having Karen Bass face Raman in the runoff rather than Bass facing Pratt serves their interests in ways that are entirely foreseeable.
He said the purpose of California’s jungle primary system has always been to produce two Democrats at the top of the ballot and turn general elections into the equivalent of Soviet elections where the ideological outcome is predetermined. Steve Hilton disrupts that in the governor’s race and Pratt disrupts it in the mayoral race, and they cannot easily do anything about Hilton at the state level, but the mayoral race is a different matter. He said Trump is not wrong to be suspicious, just does not yet have the specific documented evidence to prove it, and the question is whether California’s overlapping mail-in ballot, dropbox, and ballot harvesting infrastructure makes fully hiding vote fraud possible. He said every serious study of election processes has concluded that mail-in balloting is the worst possible method for maintaining integrity, that it takes forever to count, and that everything downstream flows from dirty voter rolls.
He described the specific mechanisms: apartments mean people move constantly but ballots keep going to old addresses; people who relocated to Nevada, Arizona, or Texas remain on California voter rolls and periodically start voting Democrat; signature verification thresholds are set by each county individually with Los Angeles using a liberal construction standard that automatically approves the vast majority of ballots with almost no manual review; and a former LA election official admitted to journalist John Fund that witness signatures on ballots from voters who cannot sign are collected without any address information and the witness signatures themselves are never verified, making the witness requirement an appearance of a safeguard rather than an actual one.
On the broader Democratic candidate field taking shape for the midterms, McKay said the roster speaks for itself. Graham Planer in Maine is a pathological liar who physically abused women and wore a Nazi tattoo for twenty years. The New Jersey candidate has documented ties to an al-Qaeda front organization and defended the Blind Sheikh, representing a district that includes the home of Todd Beamer. And now Mamdani-backed New York City congressional candidate Denisse Ayala-Shallier, who was filmed on October 8th, 2023, the day after the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, celebrating and declaring historic responsibility for defeating Israeli colonialism and American imperialism. He said this is a party that now openly despises American society and Western civilization and treats that contempt as a virtue signal. He said he is an incurable optimist and cannot bring himself to believe the American people will look at that roster and decide to give the Democrats the House or Senate, but acknowledged the party is moving in a decided and unambiguous direction that even a passive observer should be able to identify.