Greetings and welcome to this momentous 92nd edition of the Carnival of Fools! If you’re looking for informed commentary on the state of the war in Iran, then I’m happy to announce that you’ve come to the wrong place. I have no idea what’s going on in the Middle East or inside of Donald Trump’s mind right now, and neither do most of you, so let’s all just agree that it’s an enormous mess, and an entirely predictable one at that. (It will likely get worse — Trump is desperate for a face-saving “deal” likely to be honored exclusively in the breach rather than the observance.)

Instead, it’s the rare one-topic Carnival this week as we turn once again to our domestic janitorial duties and get to mopping up what’s left of California after the primary election. There is little cause for joy: Abandon all hope, ye who dwell behind the Black Gates of the Golden State.

California Is Still Counting the Vote, but They’re Already Doomed

On June 2, California held its “top two” all-party primary. Seven days later, with 82 percent of all outstanding votes having been counted, we are finally learning the results: In the pathetically half-waged California governor’s race, former state attorney general and Biden-era Secretary of Self-Impressed Submediocrity Xavier Becerra has pulled his way into a lead over Trump-endorsed, British-accented Fox News host Steve Hilton, 27.7 to 25.1 percent. Lunatic billionaire socialist Tom Steyer sits in third at 22.4, but he will not close the gap — and you should be very thankful for that.

In retrospect, Trump did the smart thing by endorsing Hilton early on — it has enabled him to consolidate enough of what remains of the Republican vote in California to move on to the second round. But that nevertheless leaves Californians with a choice between the incompetent and the impossible, and the incompetent always wins in such matchups. Becerra could fall asleep for the next five months and win the governor’s race by 59 percent. It’s shameful that this is so, but it is also altogether predictable in California, especially in a year dominated above all else by national progressive rage at Trump.

Meanwhile, what I feared most has come to pass in Los Angeles: With 93 percent of the vote now counted, a city dominated by liberal Democrats and socialists has voted to send a former communist and a Democratic Socialist to the mayoral elections in November: incumbent Marxist Karen Bass will face off against DSA Councilwoman Nithya Raman. This of course means that Spencer Pratt, the candidate whose viral campaign raised so many Republican hopes across the nation, misses the cut. I pretty much knew this would happen, hence the framing of my Election Day piece:

Internet phenomena rarely translate into real-world votes. So it will be interesting to see what kind of vote share Pratt’s buzzy and sharply focused campaign can garner. I don’t expect him to win in November, but if he can at least send Nithya Raman back to whatever progressive backrooms she slithered from, I will settle for that. Because this is California, I assume it’ll take until July before we’ve fully counted the vote.

I put it that way because far too few people understood that Pratt was always an underdog to make the November ballot. National conservative media (specifically social media) went wild over Pratt’s guerrilla campaigning and third-party advertisements, but the national sentiments of “extremely online” partisans do not reflect the sentiments of Los Angeles voters. (Astroturf grows on both sides of the political aisle, friends.) The final polls before the election clearly indicated as much: Bass in the lead, Raman surging into second place, and Pratt in third — with fully a quarter of voters undecided, nearly all of whom were Democratic-leaning. That’s where the race has finally settled.

The fact that mail-in ballots have shifted the outcome — Pratt was in second place early on Election Day — has led inevitably to charges of voter fraud. How could this ever happen absent cheating?

Very easily. In fact, this has already happened before in a Los Angeles mayoral race: In 2022, Democrat Rick Caruso went to bed on Election Night five percentage points ahead of Karen Bass, only to find himself trailing by seven points when the vote count was done — a twelve-point shift. (He ended up losing to her in November, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.) This is not to deny the existence of any and all fraud in California elections; I assume that any election system as porous (no voter ID!) and completely dominated by activist organizers and union canvassers as California’s is by definition rotten and should be dynamited, cleared away, and rebuilt.

I instead insist on a very precise point: Absolutely nothing about what I’ve seen about California’s vote, from the disgusting snail’s pace of tallying to the immensely blue margins of the day-by-day vote drops, gives me any reason to cry fraud. (By way of credential, I spent years studying the mechanics and historical patterns of vote-tallying in blue-state elections during my time with the Decision Desk HQ. I am no “instant expert” on this subject.) Nothing seems aberrant whatsoever about the way that Raman is surging. This was pretty much what I expected under California’s vote system: a strong day-of showing for the Republican candidate, erased by an endless flood of mail-in ballots in a city where Republicans are currently as popular as Italian Fascists, and frequently compared to the same.

Why? Because we’ve seen this movie before. The nature of the vote in California is extremely predictable nowadays: Republicans overwhelmingly vote in person, either early or on Election Day. Meanwhile — in a state where every resident is automatically mailed a ballot — Democrats vote overwhelmingly by mail and therefore in lopsided numbers relative to the proportion of Republican voters in the state. Trump has been screaming for years about how voting by mail is fraudulent and wrong, and GOP primary voters both there and elsewhere have taken his lesson to heart — to their extreme detriment. (Through the Bush era, Republicans were famous for dominating the absentee/mail-in vote. It’s an entirely self-inflicted disaster.)

Pratt didn’t lose because of fraud, and he didn’t lose because there was a “conspiracy” to exclude him from the November ballot in favor of Left and Lefter. (If anything, Karen Bass was desperately hoping to face him in November because she would have been able to phone in her campaign; she absolutely cannot afford to do that now. Do you think the Democratic establishment is in the habit of intentionally shooting itself in the face?) Pratt lost because — just like Chicago — Los Angeles is an 80–20 Democratic city full of disaffected progressive voters. The vast majority of primary voters in L.A. were never even considering Pratt as an option; they were vacillating between different shades of deep blue. In the end, an unsurprising number of them — likely bolstered by Steyer’s desperate, big-spending statewide get-out-the-vote operation in the governor’s race — decided at the last moment to back Raman, who poses as L.A.’s Zohran Mamdani.

I hope I have been able to sufficiently persuade you that Pratt was not denied a spot on the November ballot by fraud. But here’s the thing: I don’t mind if you refuse to accept this ugly truth. You are entirely within your rights to retain anger and suspicion about how the vote count has gone, because there are uglier truths to address. Namely, California — America’s largest state, with a GDP greater than Germany’s — has chosen to run its elections the way a notably unstable third-world country would: slothfully, overly permissively, and with willful opacity.

In California, the real scandal is what’s legal: with a universal mail-in ballot option, a seemingly endless window for ballot-counting, and legal mechanisms for unions and organizers to harvest (and later “cure”) ballots, California’s system is a black box to everyone except well-informed organizers and jaded electoral analysts — almost as if it were intentionally designed to fuel paranoia. It wasn’t, at least not at first: California’s horrible electoral system is the accumulated result of serially stupid decisions, like silt swept downstream that eventually clogs a river.

In 2012, California adopted the “top two” primary system — and at the behest of Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado, it must be remembered. (Democrats couldn’t believe their luck.) In 2016, the legislature passed A.B. 1921, which allowed mail-in ballots to be collected by designated third parties and “delivered” to the ballot box: ballot-harvesting is entirely legal in California. That same year, Governor Jerry Brown passed the Voter’s Choice Act, intended to be a pilot program whereby municipalities could “opt-in” to a vote-by-mail scheme. In 2020 — with Covid as the proffered excuse — the legislature decided to mail a copy of the ballot to every single registered voter in the state and encourage them to mail their votes back rather than vote in person (to “stop the spread,” of course).

All sort of ancillary protocols were then put in place (to “keep the vote honest”) that delay reporting of total votes in countless opaque ways. People on social media chatter about “ballot-harvesting,” but I’d wager most of them know little about ballot-curing. Mail-in ballots are subject to signature verification by comparison to the voter’s signature already on file. This is a time-intensive and error-ridden effort that usually devolves to Democratic election employees. Mismatches can be “cured,” if done so quickly: Voters are notified and given a chance to confirm their identity.

Who has the sort of manpower to make sure all those signatures are verified? You guessed it: labor unions and activist NGOs. These are the same people who have the money, personnel, and strategic capability to go around (legally) harvesting votes in the first place — and they are determined to make their investment pay off. Perhaps now it becomes clearer why the DSA-backed (and Steyer-lifted) Raman has done so strikingly well in the late-counted ballots: the organizations who most successfully exploit these laws are either well-funded or well-practiced Democratic machines.

People are right to be angry about California’s election system. It is rotten to its core and has reduced California politics to a mere test of activist strength between warring factions of the  Democratic Party — who can turn out more ballots from homebound, largely disengaged voters, the ultimate insider’s game. But it’s legal. The way Los Angeles’s vote has come in makes perfect (albeit disgusting) sense without need for any recourse to claims of “fraud.” It is a demoralizing, self-perpetuating machine. The downward spiral will continue.

Until next week.