LOS ANGELES—President Trump and his associates are escalating allegations of election fraud in California, turning to a playbook they have used previously to sow doubt about election results.
Even before former reality television star Spencer Pratt missed the cut for the November runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, he was losing ground in postelection Day vote tallies to Los Angeles City Council member and Democratic socialist Nithya Raman, prompting Trump and others to allege that the state’s vote counting wasn’t just slow, but “rigged.”
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social, before referencing the state’s messy primary to replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom, where Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Steve Hilton is clinging to second place. “Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials.”
California’s laborious vote-counting process gives Trump and his supporters plenty of time to make such claims, because state officials don’t provide final election results quickly. The majority of California voters cast their ballots by mail. State law, which favors voter participation over speed, requires that election officials verify and count every ballot that is postmarked by Election Day and arrives within a week after.
Trump, in a contentious interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that aired Sunday, said the state’s drawn-out voting process was suspicious. “Do you think it`s appropriate that they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking a winner?” he said.
There has been no evidence of impropriety.
After Trump last week questioned why the results were changing, Newsom’s office said, “These are legitimate ballots post-marked by Election Day arriving to legitimate ballot counting centers—as has been standard practice for years and a process that takes place in numerous states regardless of the party in power.”
Election officials in California’s 58 counties provide interim counts as they verify and tally ballots. Because California Republicans typically vote early or in person on Election Day, early election results often appear more right-leaning, then shift left as ballots deposited in the mail or at drop boxes on Election Day are counted, a phenomenon known as the “red mirage” or the “blue shift.”
Preliminary results released last week in Los Angeles showed Bass in first place and Pratt with a nearly 8-point lead over Raman. New tallies released daily ate into, and then erased, Pratt’s second-place position.
The Associated Press said on Monday evening that Raman will advance to the November runoff against Bass.
Others in Trump’s orbit making fraud allegations include Elon Musk, who has made more than a dozen posts on his platform X, formerly known as Twitter, questioning the California process and mail-in voting more generally.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also echoed Trump Monday, while stopping short of saying there was outright fraud. “I’m saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters. “Let’s remove the appearance of impropriety,” he added.
The president, who continues to claim without evidence that he didn’t lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden, is already drawing a direct line between this year’s political contests and his stolen-election claims from six years ago.
“It was a dirty election,” Trump said on NBC of the 2020 presidential results that he tried to overturn. “And it`s happening again right now in California.”
The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, who has been a vocal Trump supporter, has made clear he is looking at fraud claims. Essayli said Friday that California’s election system “has serious structural vulnerabilities” and that his office has “multiple election fraud investigations underway.”
“Please do not send rumors, theories, or second-hand information,” he said in another recent post. “We require direct evidence.”
Essayli shot down one claim, amplified by Musk and others, that Pratt received no votes in one tranche of ballot results released on election night by Los Angeles County elections officials. He said his office had reviewed official records and “the claim is false.”
A representative for Essayli declined to comment.
The right-wing spread of fraud allegations comes as the Trump administration is pressing several election-related initiatives ahead of this year’s midterm elections, which will shape the final two years of Trump’s presidency by determining control of Congress.
The Justice Department has sought detailed data from state voter rolls, prompting push back from more than two dozen states, which have won a number of victories in court.
The department says the data will help its efforts to protect the integrity of elections. Some of the objecting states say handing over the data would jeopardize voters’ privacy and potentially aid the administration in interfering with state election processes.
Trump in March issued an executive order instructing the Postal Service to create regulations for mail-in ballots and the Department of Homeland Security to oversee an effort to draw up lists of voters the administration considers eligible to vote. Critics say both measures could disenfranchise legitimate voters.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at [email protected] and Laura J. Nelson at [email protected]