Spencer Pratt still leads in raw votes. But the math is turning against him, and fast. Late mail-in ballot counts in the Los Angeles mayoral primary have dramatically shifted the odds toward socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman, leaving Pratt's supporters fuming and raising pointed questions about California's notoriously slow vote-counting system.
Spencer Pratt still leads in raw votes. But the math is turning against him, and fast. Late mail-in ballot counts in the Los Angeles mayoral primary have dramatically shifted the odds toward socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman, leaving Pratt's supporters fuming and raising pointed questions about California's notoriously slow vote-counting system.
As of Saturday, with 71% of ballots counted, Pratt held 28.2% of the vote to Raman's 24.9%. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass is already projected to advance to November's general election. The fight is for the second runoff slot, and despite Pratt's lead, oddsmakers now give Raman a 95% chance of claiming it.
That collapse in confidence happened in a matter of days. Oddsmakers had recently pegged Pratt's chances of advancing at better than 75%. Then Friday's ballot dump landed. Raman cut Pratt's lead by 20,672 votes in a single day. The trajectory, if it holds, points to one outcome: Pratt is likely out.
Actor and comedian Jamie Kennedy, a vocal Pratt supporter, did not hold back. Kennedy shared a post Friday showing Raman's 95% advancement odds and offered a blunt verdict:
"This is a literal crime scene. There is no way this is an honest election."
Kennedy's reaction captured the frustration rippling through Pratt's base. The "Scream" star had publicly backed Pratt's unconventional bid, and watching a comfortable lead dissolve under waves of late-counted ballots clearly struck a nerve. Others on social media echoed Kennedy's suspicions, fueling claims of election fraud — a dynamic reminiscent of recent intra-conservative backlash over public figures challenging their own side's narratives.
Whether those claims hold up is another matter. But the conditions that produce them, a candidate leading on election night only to watch that lead melt over days of opaque ballot processing, are a recurring feature of California elections, not a one-time anomaly.
Conservative pollster John McLaughlin called Raman's late surge unusual. He pointed the finger not at fraud but at a system designed to produce exactly this kind of confusion. McLaughlin blamed California's slow vote-counting apparatus for eroding public trust, arguing that final results should be available on Election Day.
"What makes it seem strange is that for Raman to be ahead or to overtake Pratt, it means that the remaining Democrat votes had to vote for Raman instead of Bass. The dynamic there is plausible, but it also raises doubts and questions about a system that's flawed."
That distinction matters. McLaughlin did not say the results were fraudulent. He said the system invites doubt, and he's right. When a county as large as Los Angeles takes days to process ballots, and each new batch tilts heavily in one direction, voters are left to choose between trusting a process they cannot see and suspecting one they cannot verify. Voters in other democracies have delivered decisive results on election night, and the legitimacy question never arises.
California's drawn-out counting process manufactures it.
Los Angeles County was still slowly and painstakingly processing thousands of uncounted ballots on Saturday. Mail-in ballots, which tend to favor Democrats, make up the bulk of what remains. And those late ballots skew young, a demographic that favors Raman over both Bass and Pratt.
Longtime political strategist Michael Trujillo laid it out plainly in comments to The California Post on Friday:
"Barring some mathematical surprise, today's results suggest that Nithya Raman is likely headed to the runoff."
For Pratt, the math is merciless. Even holding a 3.3-point lead with 71% counted, the remaining ballots would need to break his way, or at least split evenly, for him to survive. Every indication is that they won't. The same dynamic that has powered Democratic candidates in late California counts for years is now grinding down Pratt's margin batch by batch.
The broader pattern is one conservatives have seen before. Democratic party machinery may stumble in recruitment and messaging, but when it comes to banking mail-in votes in deep-blue urban counties, the infrastructure delivers.
If Raman does overtake Pratt, Los Angeles voters in November will face a choice between Karen Bass, whose tenure has been defined by the city's wildfire response failures and persistent homelessness crisis, and a self-described progressive councilmember with socialist leanings. That is not a menu that offers much to the frustrated homeowners, small-business owners, and working families who rallied behind Pratt's outsider campaign.
Pratt's candidacy drew energy from the same anti-establishment impulse that has reshaped races across the country. A reality-TV figure with no political experience, he tapped into deep dissatisfaction with the city's direction. His early strength in the vote count reflected genuine grassroots anger. But grassroots anger, in California's electoral system, runs headlong into a mail-in ballot infrastructure that consistently favors the institutional left.
Some prominent figures have been willing to break with party loyalty when the evidence warrants it. A billionaire donor recently cut ties with the Democratic Party over its direction. But in a city as blue as Los Angeles, individual defections don't change the structural math.
Raman, for her part, had been visibly emotional on election night when early returns showed her trailing badly. She broke down in tears as she faltered behind both Pratt and Bass. Days later, the late ballots are drying those tears and likely handing her a ticket to the runoff.
The core problem is not one candidate or one race. It is a vote-counting system that routinely produces multi-day swings, always in the same direction, in a state where election administration has faced repeated scrutiny. Los Angeles County Registrar-Clerk Dean Logan has his own history of election controversy, a fact that does nothing to reassure skeptics.
McLaughlin's point deserves repeating: the dynamic is plausible. Late mail-in ballots do lean Democratic. Younger voters do favor candidates like Raman. None of that requires fraud to explain. But a system that cannot count its votes in a timely fashion, and that produces dramatic late swings favoring one side, is a system that has earned the distrust it receives.
Accountability in elections, like accountability in government more broadly, depends on transparency and speed. California offers neither.
Spencer Pratt may not be out yet. But the trajectory is clear, and the voters who put him ahead on election night are watching their lead vanish into a pile of uncounted ballots that nobody can see and nobody can verify in real time. Whether or not that constitutes a crime scene, it is no way to run a democracy.
