Saturday Rewind: California fever dreams
Longshot LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt lost, as expected. An election expert who supported him debunks the MAGA lies that followed.
The predictable defeat of longshot Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt sparked weeklong and ongoing conspiracy theories.
Endorsed by Donald Trump, Pratt was a conservative in one of the bluest U.S. cities, and the last Los Angeles Times poll before the race had him placing third behind Nithya Raman, the democratic-socialist candidate who defeated him. The poll predicted the outcome accurately, along similar margins.
“I don't think that anyone would be surprised that two left-of-center people are advancing to the runoff in the Los Angeles mayoral race: one more establishment Democrat and one progressive challenger,” election expert Stephen Richer, a senior fellow at the Harvard Ash Center and former Maricopa County recorder, told All Rise News. “That's not surprising.”
Much of the MAGA world, however, refuses to trust the outcome. Trump called the case “rigged.” J.D. Vance and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) propagated baseless election conspiracy theories. LA’s top federal prosecutor, Bilal Essayli, was forced to dispel one rumor that Pratt didn’t receive any votes in a batch of 21,870 ballots, but Essayli has since started launching an extensive search for fraud, for which there has been no evidence. Essayli, a Trump appointee with no prosecutorial experience and a background in conservative politics, was disqualified as a U.S. Attorney, and the position he held is now vacant.
Not to be outdone, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton claimed on CNBC, without evidence, that California elections leave too much “opportunity for fraud,” making Republican voters “right” to distrust the results. Trump nominated Clayton for Director of National Intelligence two days later.
In an extended interview, Richer rejects Clayton’s assertion that California elections are easy to defraud.
“We know California votes almost entirely by mail: So, 90 percent-plus of the ballots in California that are cast come through mail-in balloting,” Richer noted. “A lot of those are dropped off on Election Day. Election workers aren't just ripping open those envelopes and immediately feeding the ballot into the tabulator. That would open the door for fraud, for double voting, for inaccuracy. Instead, what they're doing is they're scanning in the return envelope to make sure the voter hasn't voted twice. They're checking the signature that's on the return envelope to make sure it matches with the signatures in the voter's history in the voter's file, and they're making sure that the ballot's not damaged or otherwise manipulated before putting it into the tabulation machine and then doing a process we call adjudication.”
Richer’s debunking of California election conspiracy theories leads off this week’s “Saturday Rewind,” a compilation of videos from the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
In other interviews:
Former Southern District of New York prosecutor Mimi Rocah laments how the office’s current U.S. Attorney Clayton erodes its tradition of independence.
ProPublica reporter Molly Redden discusses her blockbuster reporting about the Justice Department quietly killing a criminal investigation into a coal empire run by Republican Sen. Jim Justice, a Trump ally from West Virginia.
Legal AF co-founder Michael Popok and I discuss the injunction blocking Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund.
Free subscribers can watch the interview with Richer on YouTube here — or all of the other videos on the All Rise News playlist of Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
