Last time around, Karen Bass lost the mayoral election both rounds and then won it with ‘late arriving ballots’.

The way the game is being played this time is even sleazier with an attempt to knock out Spencer Pratt, who finished second on Election Night, in the first round with a whole lot of ‘late arriving ballots’ for the third place candidate, Nithya Raman.

It’s not remotely credible for a third place candidate who finished on Election Night in the twenties to be picking up 40% of late arriving ballots.

The previous defense that Democrats pick up more late arriving ballots doesn’t work either because it turns out that the Democrat who gets the most late arriving ballots is… the one who needs them more.

Magical isn’t it.

All with a turnout that somehow topped the much more popular and momentous 2022 mayoral election.

But then again it was never credible for late arriving ballots to only favor one party and one party alone… the same party that by some wild coincidence also controls the political machinery of the elections.

This version of the LA steal is even slimier than the previous incarnation because it’s even less credible.

It’s also likely to succeed. The Feds are threatening intervention and investigations, and good, but cracking this kind of machine is tough because it depends on a mix of election workers, ballot harvesters and assorted turnout activists, and you can bet every judge in the state will protect them over whatever hapless theater Essayli, who has failed repeatedly, will put on.

I say that in every election in an ultra-blue city run by political machines, it’s all about beating the margin of fraud. But it’s damn hard to beat the margin of fraud when ballots are counted at glacial speeds and there’s an infinite amount of do-overs and ballots can keep trickling in so the margin of fraud can exceed legitimate votes.

Ballot harvesting has to end. Vote by mail can’t mean ballots being sent to everyone regardless of whether they’re living there, are alive, or requested them. Voter ID needs to exist. And federal investigations may turn over some rocks, as long as it’s not more failure theater from the usual crowd, but past a certain point the rest of the country needs to stop treating elections in places like California as anything other than banana republic nonsense with no legitimacy outside its borders and no legitimacy within those borders either.