As Pratt Gets Bad News, California Vote-Counting Fuels Conservative Distrust

“A net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday,” Pratt wrote on X, his frustration at California’s vote tallying methods barely concealed.

For many conservatives watching the returns, the numbers stung after a triumphant few days when it appeared as if heavily Democratic Angeleno voters were responding to Pratt’s confrontational challenge to Bass’ troubled tenure, epitomized for Pratt and his supporters by her passive response to the devastating and deadly Palisades and Altadena fires.

In the days since, conservative suspicion over California’s vote-by-mail election system and prolonged vote counting has hardened into something louder: a full-throated challenge to the legitimacy of the state’s electoral system, amplified by President Trump himself and now the subject of a federal law enforcement investigation.

The consolation for many Republicans buoyed by Pratt’s unlikely candidacy was that Trump-endorsed Steve Hilton was confirmed as securing the No. 2 outcome in the gubernatorial race. He will face off against Xavier Becerra, a career Democratic politician who has served in Congress, as California attorney general, and as Health and Human Services secretary in the Biden administration.

The gubernatorial race had its own slow resolution this week. Becerra had secured his spot in the November general election early on. But Hilton had to wait until Monday night when media outlets called the No. 2 spot in his favor over Tom Steyer – even though his lead slipped to less than three percentage points over the billionaire with 89% of ballots counted.

A system built for suspicion

To understand why conservatives are so primed for outrage over California’s ballot-counting process, it helps to understand what that process actually looks like – and how differently Republicans and Democrats have come to see it.

California is a universal vote-by-mail state, meaning ballots are automatically sent to every registered voter before Election Day. Those ballots can be returned by mail, dropped at a ballot drop box, or handed to a third party – a family member, a neighbor, a campaign worker, a union volunteer – who then returns them on the voter’s behalf. This last practice, known as ballot harvesting, is legal in California but prohibited in most other states.

Under California law, mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted if they arrive up to one week later, which is why races that appear settled on election night can flip dramatically as the week wears on. Election officials and voting rights advocates say the system is designed to maximize participation and that the extended counting timeline is a routine feature of the process, not a bug.

But critics see something far more troubling. They argue that the combination of universal mail balloting, ballot harvesting, and what they describe as lax voter roll maintenance creates a system with virtually no meaningful chain of custody for millions of ballots – and no reliable way to detect or prove fraud after the fact.

Those concerns have been fueled in part by an undercover operation conducted by provocateur James O’Keefe on Skid Row in Los Angeles, which purported to show nonprofits paying homeless people for their signatures using cash, cigarettes, and other incentives – and doing so under other people’s names and addresses.

The footage, which drew significant attention in conservative media, has not been independently verified. But for many, the images served as vivid confirmation of what they had long argued: that California's loose election infrastructure makes such schemes not only possible but difficult to detect or prosecute at scale.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli pointed to a documented case of this type of street-level vote fraud when asked for a concrete example of election-related crimes his office has prosecuted. Essayli cited a case in which a woman was caught on video paying homeless people to register to vote under fake addresses. The woman has since pleaded guilty to federal charges.

High courts weigh in

Those concerns found fresh legal expression on primary day itself, when Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, joined the American Independent Party of California in suing Secretary of State Shirley Weber. The suit alleges that 873,092 inactive voter registrations remain on California’s rolls in violation of federal law – a number that critics say illustrates exactly the kind of voter roll neglect that makes the state’s election results so difficult to trust.

The timing was pointed: Filed as Californians were still casting ballots, the lawsuit sought to draw a direct line between the state’s failure to maintain clean voter rolls and the integrity of the very election unfolding that day.

Weber’s office has yet to respond publicly to the suit’s allegations. California officials have defended the state’s voter roll maintenance practices as compliant with federal law, arguing that the National Voter Registration Act sets careful procedural guardrails before any voter can be removed from the rolls to protect against the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters.

Concerns got a significant boost Monday evening when Essayli appeared on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program Monday night.

Essayli said that for the past year, federal officials have been demanding that California hand over its voter rolls for a federal audit – and that the state has refused, citing state privacy laws. He called the argument “completely ludicrous” and said the dispute is now before the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“If California genuinely wants voters to trust its elections, it should open its records, not fight to keep them closed,” he said. “What are they afraid of?”

In the Fox News interview, Essayli painted a picture of an election system that, in his telling, seems almost designed to make accountability impossible: outdated voter rolls, no ID checks, ballots mailed to every registered address, and a ballot harvesting regime with no requirement that harvesters identify themselves or disclose how many ballots they collected.

“You have no idea who’s receiving the ballot, completing the ballot, returning the ballot,” he said. “All we have is the post office delivering millions of ballots to the registrar of voters, and we’re supposed to try to figure out what happened.”

But Essayli was careful – notably so – to stop short of alleging that fraud had actually determined the outcome of any specific race. He said the Justice Department pursues cases based on specific, articulable evidence of individual misconduct, not aggregate vote swings.

“I'm not interested in the outcome of the election,” he asserted. “I’m not interested in numbers. I’m interested in evidence where people have committed fraud.”

Essayli acknowledged that the full scope of voter fraud in California is unknowable without a comprehensive audit – precisely the audit the state is blocking.

The Spencer Pratt factor

Against that backdrop, the collapse of Pratt’s lead has become Exhibit A for how Republicans, who are outnumbered nearly two to one in voter registrations across California, view state elections.

To his supporters, the math is too suspicious to ignore. Pratt led by 40,000 votes on election night. Six days later, he trailed by more than 22,000. In a city where the homeless population numbers just over 43,000 – a figure Pratt himself pointedly referenced on social media – that swing has fueled dark speculation about where those votes came from and who, if anyone, cast them illegitimately.

President Trump, who has been a persistent critic of California’s ballot-counting pace, went further on Sunday, declaring the race “rigged” on Truth Social.

During a combative appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday, the president claimed that both the ongoing California primary races and the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged” – and clashed repeatedly with host Kristen Welker when she pressed him to back up his assertions. Welker went further, defending the system (“That’s how they vote in California”), which apparently irritated Trump, who abruptly ended the interview.

“Sorry, let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” he said, accusing the media of being “crooked” before ripping off his lapel mic and abruptly walking off.

Rep. Abe Hamadeh, an Arizona Republican, put more meat on the bone of Trump’s accusations when he accused California of “flooding the system with unverifiable mail-in ballots while deliberately staggering the count to chip away at the Republican candidate.”

Election officials and Democrats have pushed back on those characterizations, noting that late-counted mail ballots skewing Democratic is a well-documented and widely understood phenomenon – sometimes called the “blue shift” away from the election night “red mirage” – owing to the assumption that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote late in the all-mail-in process.

But for Pratt’s voters and a growing segment of California conservatives, that explanation is insufficient. What they see instead is a system that hands Democrats a structural advantage through a counting process that is opaque, drawn-out, and – in their view – impossible to verify.

A Supreme Court case that could impact all mail-in voting

While the Ninth Circuit weighs whether federal officials can access California’s voter rolls, a separate and potentially more sweeping legal battle is unfolding at the U.S. Supreme Court – one that could bring an end to the kind of drawn-out ballot counting that left Los Angeles residents still waiting, nearly a week after primary day, to learn whether Raman will advance over Pratt to a November runoff against incumbent Bass.

In March, the high court heard oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a Mississippi case that centers on the constitutionality of counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. A ruling against the practice could affect at least 14 states – including California, New York, Texas, and the District of Columbia – that currently allow late-arriving ballots to be counted so long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Around 30 states have some form of grace period for absentee ballots, including accommodations for military personnel and U.S. citizens living abroad.

For Republicans, the case represents at least a partial corrective to the recurring spectacle of election night leads dissolving over days or weeks as mail ballots trickle in, almost always breaking toward Democrats.

“What’s happening in California is a Democrat failure on full display,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said. “Nearly a week after the primary, it is completely unacceptable ballots are still being counted. That’s why the RNC is aggressively fighting in the Supreme Court to stop ballots received after Election Day from being counted. Americans deserve timely election results they can trust.

Election law experts and voting rights advocates counter that late-ballot deadlines exist to protect voters – particularly those in rural areas, seniors, and military families – who may face logistical obstacles in returning their ballots on time. Eliminating grace periods, they argue, would disenfranchise legitimate voters rather than prevent fraud.

A ruling in Watson is expected before the court’s term ends this summer.

What comes next

Whether federal scrutiny will ultimately produce evidence of systematic fraud, or whether it will reinforce existing doubts without resolving them, remains to be seen. The Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court will eventually rule on whether California must hand over its voter rolls. More prosecutions may follow the guilty plea Essayli cited.

For California Republicans, the twin dramas of the mayoral and gubernatorial primaries have reinforced a familiar and dispiriting conclusion: that winning on election night in California means very little, and that the longer the count goes on, the worse things tend to get for their side.

Whether that feeling reflects a genuine systemic problem or the painful mathematics of being the minority party in a heavily Democratic state is the central question weighing on Essayli as he pursues his investigations. With the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit, and a federal prosecutor all trained on California’s election infrastructure simultaneously, a legal response to conservative frustration may provide the only salve to healing their lack-of-a-Pratt summer wounds – at least in the short term.