About this episode

The episode discusses the issues surrounding California's ballot counting process in the context of the LA mayoral race.

California is inviting questions about its elections because of a problem that is entirely solvable: the state takes too long to count ballots. This LA mayoral race is just the latest example. Let’s look at what happened. On election night, Karen Bass was at 30 percent of the vote. Spencer Pratt was at 28 percent. Nithya Raman was around 20 percent. Every model from respected vote-modeling people that I saw indicated that Raman would gain more than Pratt in the later votes, presumably giving her enough to catch up to a less-distant third place without surpassing Pratt’s campaign. Instead, we got an avalanche of late Raman support. Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The first vote drop had Raman running about 10 percent ahead of Pratt. The second was stronger. Then Friday came around, and things got really weird. Whether you want to ascribe malicious motives to it or whether it’s totally above board and legitimate, the fact that this is happening on Friday for an election that happened on Tuesday becomes suspicious when Raman gets 40 percent of the vote total in a…

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