Rep. Ro Khanna says a close friend who backed Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral primary has unregistered to vote, convinced Pratt was "robbed of the election" after a drawn-out California vote count flipped the race days after polls closed.
The Democratic congressman from California made the admission on X on Tuesday, calling on his own state to invest in faster ballot processing. It is a striking concession from a sitting Democrat: that California's election machinery is so sluggish it is actively eroding public confidence and pushing people out of the democratic process entirely.
The backdrop is the LA mayoral primary, where former reality TV star Spencer Pratt held second place, enough to advance to a runoff, before councilwoman Nithya Raman overtook him in updated vote counts on Sunday. California law allows mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted so long as they are postmarked by Election Day. That policy, combined with processing delays, means results in some races can shift for days or even weeks after voters go to the polls.
Khanna did not name the friend but described the person as someone close to him. The New York Post reported that Khanna wrote the friend was "infuriated" by the outcome and had lost trust in the counting process.
Khanna posted on his X account:
"He is convinced Spencer Pratt was robbed of the election."
Rather than dismiss the concern, Khanna went further. He acknowledged that California's prolonged tabulation feeds suspicion, and said the state should fix it.
"[W]e need to figure out in California how we can get the vote counted faster and results tabulated so it does not drag on."
He added that California, the wealthiest state in the nation, should be willing to spend the money to get most votes counted within 48 hours. That timeline would represent a dramatic improvement over the current reality, where some races remain unresolved for weeks.
The congressman's admission lands at a moment when Democratic vulnerability in California is already a growing concern for the party.
California's slow counts are not a bug. They are a feature of laws designed to expand voter access. The state accepts mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, provided they carry a timely postmark. USPS delays can push arrival dates further out. Counties then process those ballots in batches, often over days.
Khanna acknowledged a pattern: Election Day votes in California tend to skew more Democratic. That means conservative or outsider candidates can appear to lead in early returns, only to watch those leads dissolve as late-arriving mail ballots are counted. The dynamic is tailor-made to generate distrust.
California voting and redistricting expert Paul Mitchell engaged Khanna in an online exchange. Mitchell explained the mechanics plainly:
"There is the state law that ballots to be accepted when they are postmarked on time, mailed on Election Day or, commonly, mailed the week before but USPS delays cause them to be late."
Mitchell suggested that more staffing could speed up counting and said officials could work with counties to fund additional election workers. But he also pushed back on the idea that policy should change to satisfy critics, arguing that officials should not "let conspiracy theorists or the loudest disingenuous actors online guide our policy choices."
That framing, dismissing concerns about transparency as conspiracy, is precisely the kind of response that drives ordinary voters to give up. Khanna, to his credit, did not adopt it. He treated the frustration as legitimate.
Mitchell noted that the Supreme Court is set to decide a case involving mail-in voting that could impose limits on California's current ballot-acceptance policies. No case name or docket number was provided in the exchange, but the reference signals that the legal ground beneath California's system may be shifting.
If the Court narrows the window for accepting late-arriving ballots, California would have to adapt, potentially solving part of the trust problem by compressing the count. For now, the state's approach remains an outlier that leaves voters watching results change for days after they cast their ballots.
The broader pattern of delayed disclosure and accountability failures in California governance makes the vote-counting issue harder for officials to brush aside. Voters already primed to distrust Sacramento are not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt when election results keep moving.
Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star, ran an unconventional campaign for Los Angeles mayor and held second place in the primary, the last qualifying spot for a runoff. Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist and sitting councilwoman, trailed him.
Then Sunday's updated counts flipped the standings. Raman overtook Pratt, knocking him out of the runoff. The reversal fueled frustration among Pratt's supporters, many of whom viewed the late shift as evidence that something had gone wrong.
No specific vote totals or margins separating the two candidates were provided. But the emotional impact was clear enough that a friend of a sitting congressman walked away from the voter rolls entirely.
Los Angeles election controversies are not new. Recent proposals from LA council Democrats to expand voting eligibility have only added to the sense that the city's election rules are a moving target.
Khanna's posts are notable not because they break new factual ground. Everyone who follows California politics knows the counts are slow. What makes them significant is the source. A Democratic congressman is saying publicly that the system his own party built is failing a basic test of public trust.
He did not blame voters for being suspicious. He did not call them conspiracy theorists. He said the state should spend the money and fix the problem.
"It is worth spending the resources to get the vast majority of the vote counted within 48 hours."
That is a reasonable position. It is also an indictment. California is the wealthiest state in the country. It has had years to modernize its counting infrastructure. It has chosen not to. And the result is exactly what Khanna describes: eroding trust and conspiracy theories that take root in the gap between Election Night and the final tally.
The question is whether anyone in Sacramento is listening. California's Democratic leadership has shown little appetite for reforms that might limit the advantages built into the current system. Accusations of political maneuvering in the state's primary system are already a sore point heading into the next election cycle.
Mitchell's response, that policy should not bend to the "loudest disingenuous actors online", captures the establishment position. The problem is that the person raising the alarm this time is not a fringe figure on social media. It is a Democratic congressman relaying the experience of a personal friend.
When your own allies are unregistering to vote, the system is not working. Dismissing that as conspiracy only widens the gap.
Election integrity does not depend only on whether ballots are counted correctly. It depends on whether voters believe they are counted correctly. A system that takes days or weeks to produce final results, and routinely reverses the apparent outcome, invites doubt regardless of whether the underlying count is accurate.
Khanna said the slow counts are "eroding trust and spawning conspiracy theories." He is right. And the fix he proposed, faster counting through better investment, is not radical. It is the bare minimum a functioning state should deliver.
California has the money. It has the technology. What it lacks is the political will to prioritize transparency over convenience. Until that changes, voters like Khanna's friend will keep walking away, and the people who stay will have less and less reason to trust what they see.
When a Democrat from Silicon Valley has to beg his own state to count votes in a timely fashion, the problem is no longer a talking point. It is an admission.
