It's Time to Fix How California Counts Votes. Does Platner Still Have a Shot? (with Bill Scher)

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 drop. She’s not only running ahead of Pratt, she’s running ahead of Bass. The same thing happened Saturday. The same thing happened Sunday. Now Raman is through to face Bass in the general a week after this sort of outcome — even in LA — seemed unlikely. Am I saying that somebody cured ballots after seeing the results? Am I saying somebody harvested ballots? No. I don’t know specifics, and nobody else does, quite frankly. I’m saying you don’t have to do this. Opening the process up this way is the reason you create suspicion. Is it odd? Yeah, it is odd. Even the people who thought Raman was going to overtake Pratt thought it would happen by the skin of her teeth at the very end. Nobody thought it was going to be over by the weekend. It’s beyond expectations. I’m going to renew my call here, and it’s not just me saying it. You’ve got systems in America that process a lot of votes really fast, and the way they do it is not rocket science. Florida created a system after 2000 that handles a lot of early voting and a lot of vote-by-mail, but those ballots are processed before Election Day and then dumped into the results when the polls close. If we’re in an era of declining trust in elections, then I don’t care how you think we got here. I don’t care if you think it was Chicago in 1960, hanging chads in 2000, Democrats in 2020, Elon Musk and Starlink in 2024, or any of the other election fraud theories that have floated around American politics. What I care about is creating a system that we can all look at and say, “Seems like what happened.” I don’t think California is close to having that, and it’s only going to get worse if we don’t make some big changes ahead of 2028. Chapters 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:22 - California Results 00:13:57 - Interview with Bill Scher 00:35:08 - FISA 00:38:06 - Walz and Ellison 00:41:19 - Dems’ New Super PAC 00:44:09 - Interview with Bill Scher, con’t 01:13:13 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe