LA Left Leads Leap

As of the end of election night, March 5, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon had garnered 22% of the vote.

As of the same time, Democratic Socialists of America member Los Angeles Councilwoman Nithia Raman, running as a plain old Democrat, had 45.75% of the vote in her three-way 4^th district council race.

But things have changed since, with about 600,000 (or 37% of the total vote) additional votes getting tabulated in the week and a half since.

Gascon now stands at 25% of the vote in his 11-way race and Raman has broken 50%, meaning she will almost certainly avoid the November runoff that was staring her directly in the face on March 6.

Looked at another way, of the votes counted after election day, Gascon got 27% of that vote and Raman got nearly 60% of the new votes in her district.  In other words, Gascon got an extra 5 points and Raman got 14 points more in the continuing counting as compared to the election day count.

And of the 600,000 or so ballots counted, the overwhelming majority were “vote by mail” (VBM) ballots.

Initially the LA County Registrar’s Office, headed by Dean Logan, no stranger to charges of vote count manipulation (see Gascon recall signature issue here and his time in Seattle here) said there were about 350,000 left to count after election day.  The next day, the office upped the estimate, saying in a press release that:

The estimate of outstanding ballots to be processed is 460,500. See estimates below:

• Vote by Mail ballots (VBM): 450,000

• Conditional Voter Registration ballots: 10,000

• Provisional ballots: 500

This estimate has been adjusted based on Vote by Mail ballots received in the mail today and the estimated number of ballots returned at Vote Centers and Official Drop Boxes on Election Day.

The number of outstanding Vote by Mail ballots will increase as the RR/CC continues to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day and received through Tuesday, March 12 (E+7). These ballots are not included in the estimate.

Overall, there were 1,638,458 ballots cast in the primary (a very few remain out – more on that shortly) and 1,316,936 were vote by mail.  That makes for a 29% turnout – a bit better than expected – with VBM ballots (80%)  outpacing regular votes (20%)  by four to one.

As for Gascon’s challengers, their vote mostly slipped, percentage-wise, in the same time frame. Nathian Hochman, the second place finisher who will face Gascon in the fall, went from about 18% to about 16%, third place finisher Jon Hatami stayed about the same at about 13.2%, Debra Archuleta in fourth went from 8.8% to 8.5%, though fellow progressive and fifth place finisher Jeff Chemerinsky went from 7.3% to 7.9%.

The progressive shift pattern mimics what happened in the recent LA mayor’s race, with businessman Rick Caruso seeing an essentially tied race sift to about 5% the wrong way to Karen Bass.

Statewide, though, the continuing count has not seen such a leftward shift.

On election night, senate primary candidate Adam Schiff had 33.2% of the vote – he now has 31.7% and is only about 5,000 votes ahead of Steve Garvey (oddly, Garvey easily won the other “finish the term” for two months in the job” primary.)

Garvey has dropped as well, moving from 32.4% to 31.7%, but that percentage drop has been half of Schiff’s, hence the tightening of the race.  Interestingly, Schiff and Garvey combined for 65.6% of the vote reported on election night – now that number is 63.4%, again, mostly due to Schiff’s slide.

The fate of Proposition 1 also still hangs in the balance.  Election day reporting showed it getting 50.2%, against the “no” vote of 48.8%.  That has tightened slightly to now 50.1% to 49.9%, or about a 20,000 vote spread (late last week that gap was about 40,000.)

So why the noticeable left shift in LA and not really statewide?

It appears that the later the ballot is returned (the election night count included VBM ballots the Registrar had received by the Monday before election day) the more likely it is to go left.

So why is that?

Before we try to answer that, let’s look at another county and another election – the March 2020 Riverside County primary – pre “everyone gets a ballot in the mail” pandemic madness (though the requests did skyrocket, with VBM ending up outpacing in-person voting for the first time in the county.)

In this election, the majority of the votes were cast by mail.  But the registrar (note – when I served as mayor and on the city council of Lake Elsinore I found the Registrar’s Office to be professional and honest) did a breakout of type of vote for each candidate: VBM, polling place, and “provisional.”  

Provisional votes included same-day registration, ballots dropped off, people who voted at the wrong polling place (a number of locations had changed that year,) and damaged ballots.  In other words, typically what could be described as later votes and, depending upon the race, they made up between 5 and 10% of the votes cast.

The results showed something rather interesting.  The “provisionals” broke heavily, in comparison to the other votes, to the left on an issue or to the Democrat candidate.

There were two spending propositions on the ballot that year – both lost.. one 62 to 38%, the other 53 to 47%.  In the first case, the provisional ballots were only 53% no, in the latter only 40% no; in other words, “yes” won the provisionals.

The same pattern held true for all of the county’s federal and state individual elections as well.  In fact, the provisional votes count tended to be about 10 points “to the left” of both the VBM and regular ballots

That shift to the left in presumably later ballots (but not necessarily standard VBM) was similar to the shift LA county is seeing now.

Note as to the ballots remaining in LA (as referenced above): there are still about 5,000 to be counted.  Those votes seem to have not been counted due to wonky signatures but they can be fixed by the voter (per Registrar press release):

The outstanding Vote by Mail ballots left to be processed are pending signature cures from voters whose signatures on the Return Envelope were missing or did not match their registration records.

These voters have been notified with instructions on how to cure their ballots to be counted. The RR/CCwill accept cure notices through March 27, 2024.

Of course, the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 congressional midterms also saw the late vote left shift – the presidential vote in particular.

Bringing us back to the question of why.

VBM voters who have not typically voted before – when the state sends out a ballot to everyone, not just those who request one – tend to both vote late and left.  That is very clear from the statistics nationally and locally and, as in LA, the either ”low information voter” or the “harvested voter”  or what have you, can change election results mightily.

Is it due to ballot harvesting? Absolutely. Is it due to the Democratic Party being better at getting their vote out? Yes. Is it due to fraud; i.e. the fact that VBM ballots are inherently less secure than traditional in-person voting?

Speaking personally, I have no doubt that, in general, fraud plays a role in the shift throughout the nation.

For example, if the LA late vote count followed more closely to the election day count, Raman – one of the furthest left elected officials in the country – would be facing a run-off in November and now she’s not. That much is clear.  Rabid DSA folks working the door knocking? Maybe, though that would most likely have shown up in the day-of count as well.

But if the late vote is left, why is the state count not showing that much, if any, of the shift?  That is unknown, but it could very well be that larger cities and counties, for whatever reason, are more prone to phenomena and that once the results “filter up” to the entire state they lose their “percentage oomph” and the bump is smoothed away in the larger voting pool.

Two things are certain, though.  First, California – and every other state – should cut and paste Florida’s election system immediately.  The system was put in place after the Bush/Gore “hanging chad” fiasco and has worked flawlessly since.  The count is fast and trustworthy and respected by the candidates and, most importantly, by the public.

It is also important to stress that – in the light of leftists claims that systems like Florida’s “suppress the vote” – in 2020 Florida’s voter turnout was 71.7% and California’s 68.5%.  Florida bested California again in 2022, 49.35% to 43.43% – the national average that year was 46.6%.

Second, and possibly more importantly, a system – any system – that is clunky and burdensome and spotty and complicated and intentionally creates grey areas – as does the current voting system in California – is extremely vulnerable to both incompetence and fraud.

From overly-obtuse engineering flow charts to adding weird extra rules to board games to voting, any grey area created by unnecessary and typically counter-intuitive processes and modifications are ripe for hiding malfeasance and/or sheer stupidity.

Voting should not be complicated. Counting ballots should not be complicated. They are made so on purpose to benefit one side of the political spectrum. In other words, the “mistakes” always go the same direction.

The public no longer has faith in the most essential system in a democratic republic – voting, choosing our leaders, picking people who spend our money, who regulate us.

And that is one of saddest facts of the day.