The most puzzling election outcome in CA last week was the race for mayor in L.A. Mayor Karen Bass is the first mayor in 21 years that didn’t win outright in June. Spencer Pratt was the first Republican in a very long time consistently polling high enough to force a runoff.
But a funny thing happened after the polls closed. An L.A. councilwoman by the name of Nithya V. Raman soared to second place in a very startling fashion.
Raman is a “Democratic Socialist,” often characterized as the West-Coast Mamdani. However, the Democratic Socialists didn’t endorse her in this race. Raman also waited until the last minute – just hours before the deadline – to enter the race and that was after she had already endorsed Bass. Moreover, she didn’t win the most votes for mayor from her own constituents in her own city council district. And finally, if that isn’t enough, Raman basically conceded defeat on election night in front of her supporters.
The Dirty Details
Well, of course, we no longer have election night in CA, we have election month. And, within days of the polls closing, votes came pouring in for Raman in, quite frankly, an unbelievable torrent.
On election night June 3, Mayor Bass had received 37% of the vote, or about 139,000 votes. Pratt had 30% of the vote, at 117,000. Raman? She had 21%, at 79,000 votes.
A few days and updates later – June 7, to be exact –, the mayor’s votes had increased to 250,000, a 79% increase. Pratt’s totals went to 193,000, a 70% increase. Raman? She went from 79,000 votes to 196,000 – a 148% increase – meaning, percentage wise, she garnered about as many votes as Bass and Pratt combined.
By June 8, Bass was at 276,000. Pratt had 207,000. And Raman had 229,000. All in all, from when the polls closed on June 3, Raman received a 190% increase in votes.
How did she get so popular all of a sudden?
In the old days, most results held on election night through the rest of the ballot processing period. But, with ballot harvesting, late dumps can now create some mystifying results.
If Raman’s district didn’t vote for her, and her ideologues in the DSA didn’t endorse her, how did she come in second, to her own surprise?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Of course, finding out the particulars isn’t going to be easy, because the state of CA has a new law, Senate Bill 73, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom just days before the June 2026 primary, to prevent unauthorized law enforcement interference with state elections. The law explicitly bars certain actions that could be used to disrupt or investigate election results without proper legal authority, read that, a court order. How is someone supposed to collect enough evidence to justify a court order? Including the federal government, which has a distinct interest in the federal elections overseen and conducted by state and local authorities, not to mention the over-arching authority of the supremacy clause.
That remains to be seen.
AB2624 Prevents Exposing Fraud By Legal Means
I, for one, believe SB 73 is akin to another bill aimed at protecting potential fraud. That would be the “Stop Nick Shirley Act”: AB2624.
Nick Shirley is a citizen journalist exposing widespread fraud across the country, fraud that is bankrupting the United States. The Act seeks to intimidate citizen journalists from investigating and exposing corruption, such as that already uncovered by Mr. Shirley in Minnesota and CA.
If a citizen journalist shows up at a fake hospice center with a camera, for example, our pro-crime government could levy fines starting at $4,000.
As reported by the California Globe, “Nick Shirley has released a devastating 40-minute investigative video that exposes what appears to be massive waste and potential fraud in California’s hospice, Medi-Cal, and daycare, programs. His report, now viewed more than 7.7 million times on X, uncovers over $170 million in questionable billings tied to ghost hospice and daycare operations that show virtually no signs of actually caring for patients or children.”
Nick Shirley writes: “This bill puts journalists at civil risk for investigating fraud and makes it harder to expose fraud in “immigration support services,” including nonprofits and health care facilities that receive hundreds of millions from the state of California each year.
Want to know the insult to the injury?
The Stop Nick Shirley bill was authored by Assembly member Mia Bonta, wife of California Attorney General Rob Bonta. It is Rob Bonta’s job to investigate fraud. He is not interested in anything, however, but continually suing the Trump administration. And now he and his wife are preventing others from doing his job.
Shutting down investigative journalism is a form of tyranny and so are unexplainable election results.
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell
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