California’s Electoral Sewer

On the night of June 3rd, Spencer Pratt was running a solid second in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, comfortably ahead of socialist councilwoman Nithya Raman and headed for a November runoff against incumbent mayor Karen Bass. Raman herself apparently believed it — she gave a concession speech. Then the mail-in ballots started arriving. In one batch of exactly 10,000 votes counted in a single tranche, not one went to Pratt. Zero. Every single ballot was split between the two Democrats. In the days that followed, Raman somehow began outpolling Bass — the sitting mayor of a major American city — in nearly every subsequent batch, allowing her to leapfrog Pratt and claim the second runoff spot. If you find that statistically plausible, I have a high-speed rail project in California to sell you.

I spent years hosting a daily Spanish-language talk radio program on Univision in Southern California, and I used to refer to the California Democratic Party, only half-jokingly, as “the California PRI.” For readers unfamiliar with Mexican politics: the Partido Revolucionario Institucional governed Mexico for most of the twentieth century through a system that was formally democratic but fundamentally rigged — elections were decided before they were held, unions were transmission belts for the ruling party, and genuine alternation of power was essentially unthinkable. It took decades of civic struggle and, ultimately, the historic decision of President Ernesto Zedillo to unilaterally dismantle the PRI’s institutional fraud before Mexico could have real elections. California isn’t there yet. In fact, it’s moving in the opposite direction.

The state’s electoral system has been built piece by piece since 2011 into something that can’t be audited and wasn’t meant to be. Where to start. California requires no identification to vote. It automatically mails ballots to every registered voter, including hundreds of thousands who have moved, died, or never existed. Mail-in ballot signatures are not meaningfully verified. A practice called ballot harvesting allows anyone to collect an unlimited number of completed ballots and deliver them, with no supervision of what happens between the voter and the collector. And mail-in votes can keep arriving days after Election Day, turning the count into an opaque process that drags on for weeks. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli didn’t mince words: “Our system sucks. We have universal vote by mail. We have no voter ID. That is a recipe for fraud.”

Then there is the homeless vote. Los Angeles County has 72,308 homeless residents — though “resident” may be generous — according to the county’s own 2025 count. Under California law, a person without a fixed address can register to vote using a shelter, a park bench, or a street corner as their address. Public records show 7,600 voters registered at homeless shelters and service providers across the county. The most egregious case: the Midnight Mission on Skid Row lists 1,160 registered voters — at a facility with beds for 120 people. A drop-in center in Venice with zero beds had 185 registered voters, and had received $600,000 in taxpayer funds courtesy of Nithya Raman herself. Videos recorded on Skid Row this week and already delivered to the Department of Justice show homeless residents claiming they were paid between $2 and $5 to vote for Bass or Raman. One man says he negotiated his payment up from $2 to $4. Another says the people who came around “come out here all the time.”

Since 2014, California has issued driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. The state’s automatic voter registration system, tied to obtaining that license, makes it nearly impossible to verify the citizenship of registrants — because California law bars election officials from accessing DMV data or federal immigration records. As investigative journalist Peter Schweizer has documented, the state’s election laws have been deliberately constructed to make fraud legal, or at least undetectable. “If you make election fraud legal,” Schweizer asks, “is it still fraud?”

Now for the part that nobody wants to say out loud. Half of Los Angeles County’s residents are Hispanic. Half of California’s union members are Hispanic. Hispanic leaders dominate the state’s union hierarchy. Mexicans make up between 75 and 80 percent of California’s Hispanic population. California’s unions and the Democratic Party — in California, they are the same thing. The state is not right-to-work, which means unions enjoy privileges and political power unavailable to them in most of the country.

Honestly? It’s hard not to wonder whether a culture of electoral corruption crossed the border along with the millions of Hispanic immigrants who did. In Mexico, for most of the twentieth century, electoral fraud was not the exception — it was the system. I’m not pointing fingers — I’m asking a question I’ve been sitting with for years, and one I raised repeatedly on my radio program, always in the first-person plural: we who come from broken and corrupt societies have a particular responsibility not to replicate what we left behind. Many of us came here precisely to escape it. It would be a historic tragedy to become its accomplices.

California’s Democrats show no sign of wanting to fix any of this — why would they? The system works for them. The only thing that might change it is a voter ID initiative that has already qualified for the November ballot — though Victor Davis Hanson, who has watched California politics from the Central Valley for decades, is already betting it will be struck down by a federal judge the moment it passes. He may well be right. But the fraud is now documented, the videos are in the hands of federal prosecutors, and the spectacle of a major American city’s election being decided by ballots harvested from people who were paid $4 to vote is no longer something that can be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. It is on tape.