When late arriving ballots in the race for Los Angeles Mayor turned dramatically against conservative Spencer Pratt last week, Donald Trump reacted with his usual subtlety.
“They’re cheating on the election,” said the President, as it became clear Pratt would be knocked out of the runoff for the November general election.
Democrats were quick to respond. California Attorney General Rob Bonta dismissed claims of vote fraud as “a figment of the imagination of Trump and others involved in that conspiracy theory.”
Bonta is right there’s no direct evidence that fraud swayed the LA Mayor’s race. But California’s notorious tardiness in counting votes has been almost universally ridiculed and has undermined public trust in elections.
“It’s hard to overstate how much of an outlier California is for its slow vote-counting relative to literally any other state or almost any other industrialized democracy,” says Nate Silver, a former top election analyst for ABC News.
