I Want Pratt To Win. But This Probably Isn’t Fraud.

The system is biased. But that’s not the same as fraudulent.

This letter is part of my series on Spencer Pratt. Read the full series here.

Let me get the disclosure out of the way.

I wanted Spencer Pratt to advance.

I’ve written multiple pieces making the case for him.

As someone who lived in LA for over a decade, the prospect of Karen Bass winning again is bad, and the prospect of Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman winning might be worse.

I’m currently taking a sabbatical away from LA, but the outcome of this election might make that permanent.

When election night results showed Pratt comfortably in second place with a 40,000-vote lead over Raman, I was happy.

When subsequent batches of mail-in ballots narrowed that lead to 33,000, then 20,000, then within a single percentage point, I was disappointed.

When the Right started calling it fraud, I understood the emotional impulse.

I felt it too.

I’m writing this piece because the impulse, however understandable, is doing more damage than people realize.

Not just to election outcomes, but to our ability to think at all.

Why This Piece Is Hard to Write

Writing this is harder than writing a partisan piece, and I want to be transparent about why.

These articles take many hours to write. The videos take longer.

When they don’t perform well, it impacts my livelihood directly.

The honest reality is that it would be much easier and much more profitable for me to deliver partisan takes that validate what my audience already believes, and my audience is right-leaning.

That work gets rewarded with engagement, growth, and income. Telling people that their initial reaction might be wrong gets rewarded with unsubscribes.

Multiple times over the past week, I’ve had the instinct to post a tweet about how dumb California’s election system is, or how the left games everything.

Those tweets would have done well. They would have gotten attention, validation, agreement, and money.

They also would not have been principled. They would have been emotional reactions.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

First, I want you to stay open to what’s coming, even if you don’t like it.

This piece isn’t fun to write, but it’s necessary, and I’m hoping you’ll read it the way I’m trying to write it: as one American trying to think clearly with another.

We have to be able to do this if the country is going to work.

I’m trying to lead by example.

Second, because I want you to watch this dynamic everywhere you encounter political commentary.

Including with me.

The financial incentives in this industry overwhelmingly favor giving people attention-grabbing takes fueled by negativity, tribalism, and suspicion.

The incentives are not aligned with telling you the truth, especially when the truth is boring or uncomfortable.

Most political content creators, including ones you trust, are responding to those incentives whether they realize it or not.

The biggest influencers on the right have made millions feeding the audience what the audience wants to hear. So have the biggest ones on the left.

The model works financially. But it also produces a media environment where every outcome you don’t like becomes evidence of fraud, malice, or conspiracy, because that’s what generates clicks.

Watch for it. Watch for it in me. Notice when someone confirms exactly what you already believed with exactly the level of outrage you were already feeling.

That’s often a sign you’re being sold a story, not given an analysis.

The story might still be true.

But you should be more skeptical of stories that flatter you than stories that don’t.

People are confused and angry. The outrage machine is exhausting to live inside. I’m tired of every political moment being a death match without introspection.

Frankly, it’s burning me out and making me want to stop analyzing politics altogether.

I keep doing it because I’m drawn to topics where there’s confusion. I enjoy helping people think more clearly. And politics is the epicenter of confusion right now.

So with all that said, let me show you what I actually see.

How We Got Here

It’s worth taking a moment to ask why so many people instantly assumed fraud the moment Pratt’s lead started slipping.

The honest answer is that we no longer have the trust we used to have.

There was a time, even within recent memory, when American politics had a level of shared baseline. People were disappointed when elections didn’t go their way, but they didn’t routinely challenge the legitimacy of the outcome. There was a level of trust in the basic functioning of the system that covered the gaps in any one person’s knowledge of how it worked.

That trust is gone. COVID broke part of it. The 2020 election broke another part. Biden’s cognitive decline being denied for years and then suddenly admitted broke another. A long string of institutional failures and social media hallucinations has made consensus reality, a baseline that everyone agrees on, a thing of the past.

This makes skepticism a reasonable default. The people who tell you to just trust the system haven’t done the work to earn that trust back. Real reasons to doubt mainstream narratives exist, and dismissing those reasons would itself be dishonest.

But there’s a specific dynamic at play that’s worth naming. American politics right now is a bad marriage.

In a bad marriage, the couple fights about everything. The dishes. The schedule. The in-laws. The actual content of the fights almost doesn’t matter. The problem isn’t any specific disagreement. The problem is that the underlying relationship is broken. Trust is gone. Communication has collapsed. Every gesture from the other person gets interpreted in the worst possible light, not because the gesture is actually bad, but because the relationship has trained both people to expect the worst.

An absence becomes evidence of cheating. A mistake becomes evidence of malice. A moment of incompetence becomes evidence of intentional evil. Both people in a bad marriage do this. Both feel justified. Both can point to real instances where the other person actually was wrong, and they use those real instances to confirm that every subsequent ambiguity is also bad faith.

This is what American politics looks like right now.

Two sides who genuinely don’t trust each other, who interpret everything the other side does through the worst possible lens, who have stopped extending good faith because they’ve been burned doing it before.

Some of the suspicion is earned on both sides.

But when you’re in a bad marriage, adopting a default of suspicion is the road to divorce.

The discipline of a good marriage, or a functioning democracy, is exactly the discipline of not doing that.

Here’s what this means in practical terms.

The worse the relationship gets, the stronger your reasoning needs to be.

Because you can’t trust the relationship to provide the baseline.

You have to provide it yourself, through discipline.

I can’t tell you whether there’s fraud in this race. I can’t tell you if it’s the reason Pratt might lose.

No one can. The answer isn’t fully knowable yet.

What I’m going to do is offer a way to think about this clearly.

That will help you stay calm when everyone around you is panicking.

That will make you harder to manipulate by anyone who profits from your attention.

Including me.

One quick caveat before going further.

Nothing I’m about to write means zero fraud has ever happened in California. In any system involving millions of ballots, some people will try to cheat, and some will succeed. That’s true everywhere.

But individual fraud and election-flipping fraud are different claims at different scales. To flip a major race like this one, you’d need tens of thousands of coordinated fraudulent ballots, evading signature verification, escaping detection by Republican observers at every step, and staying unreported by everyone involved in counting. The first happens. The second requires evidence we haven’t seen.

How California Counts Votes

California’s vote counting works differently from most of the country, and most people upset right now don’t understand the mechanics, so understandably, they are suspicious.

Understanding the system is the prerequisite for evaluating whether it’s working as designed or being manipulated.

Let me be clear before walking through it: I’m not endorsing California’s system. I think there are legitimate critiques of how it operates, especially the lack of voter ID.

But to critique a system, we have to first understand what it actually does.

California allows three primary ways to vote.

1. In-person on Election Day at vote centers.

2. Early in-person voting in the weeks before the election.

3. Vote-by-mail, with ballots accepted as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and arrive within seven days after.

Every registered California voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. They can use it or vote in person. This system was expanded significantly during COVID and has remained in place.

Counties have up to 30 days after Election Day to complete their canvass, verify signatures on mail-in ballots, and process provisional ballots. This is required by state law.

Mail-in ballots are processed in batches as they come in. The signature verification is labor-intensive. Each envelope’s signature must be compared against the voter’s signature on file. Mismatches can be cured, meaning voters are notified and given a chance to confirm their identity. This adds days or weeks to the process.

What this means in practice: election night results are nowhere close to final.

The ballots counted on Election Day are largely group 1: in-person votes and the mail-in ballots that arrived early.

The ballots counted in the days and weeks after are predominantly group 2: late-arriving mail-in ballots.

These two groups vote differently.

Understanding this will help you understand why it looked like Spencer Pratt was going to win, but now looks like he’s going to lose.

Why Mail-In Ballots Skew Progressive

Here’s the part that frustrates conservatives the most, and it’s the part that looks most like fraud if you aren’t given an alternative explanation.

Mail-in ballots in California, and increasingly across the country, lean Democratic. They have for years. The reason is structural and demographic.

Consider who is most likely to vote by mail and who is most likely to vote in person.

Voters who choose mail-in ballots tend to be younger.

They’re more likely to be renters who move frequently.

They’re more likely to be students who may be away from their registered address.

They’re more likely to work jobs without the flexibility to take time off on a Tuesday.

They’re more likely to have small children and limited childcare options.

Voters who choose in-person voting tend to be older.

They’re more likely to be homeowners with stable addresses.

They’re more likely to have flexible schedules or to be retired.

They’re more likely to view voting as a ritual to be performed in person.

Look at the demographics of each group and the partisan tilt is obvious. The younger, renter, lower-propensity voter skews Democratic. The older, homeowner, ritual voter skews Republican. This is true at the national level and especially true in cities like Los Angeles.

There’s a second factor, and it’s one Republicans have done to themselves. Starting in 2020, Donald Trump and a significant portion of the conservative media ecosystem spent years telling Republican voters that mail-in voting was suspect and fraud-prone.

Republicans listened. Republican mail-in voting collapsed. Republican in-person voting held steady.

Democrats, meanwhile, invested heavily in mail-in voting infrastructure. They built operations to make sure their voters knew how to use the system. They invested in ballot collection programs.

The result: when mail-in ballots are counted in California, they break Democratic. Sometimes by 20 points. Sometimes by 30.

It’s the structural reality of every election since 2020.

So when election night shows a Republican leading and the lead evaporates as mail-in batches are counted, the most likely explanation isn’t fraud. The most likely explanation is that the Republican led among in-person voters and lost among mail-in voters, and the in-person votes got counted first.

This is exactly what happened to Spencer Pratt. He won election-night in-person voting comfortably. He’s losing the mail-in count. Both are by structural design.

This pattern has a name in election analysis: the blue shift. It’s been documented in California for over a decade.

Sometimes Mail-In Voting Favors Republicans

Conservatives reading this might assume mail-in voting just inherently favors Democrats. It doesn’t.

Florida is the one major state where Republicans dominate mail-in voting. Florida Republicans are more likely to vote by mail than Florida Democrats, according to data from the University of Florida Election Lab.

The result has been a steady Republican trend in Florida elections for over a decade, partly driven by Republican mail-in turnout operations that started before Trump’s anti-mail-in rhetoric and continued through it.

More recently, some Republican operatives have realized that ceding mail-in voting to Democrats was a strategic disaster. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA built mail-in operations in Arizona. Scott Pressler did the same in Pennsylvania. The RNC under new leadership pushed mail-in turnout in 2024.

The results were immediate.

The New York Times analyzed mail-in data across states and found Republicans made almost universal gains in mail-in voting in 2024.

Pennsylvania’s share of mail-in voters who are registered Republicans jumped from 24% in 2020 to 33% in 2024. Trump won Pennsylvania partly because of this shift. The same pattern showed up in Connecticut, Florida, and other states across the political spectrum.

Pre-2020, Republicans actually pioneered mail-in voting.

Older white voters, military families, rural voters, and business travelers were Republican-leaning groups that used mail-in heavily.

The Republican mail-in advantage was the norm for years before Trump’s 2020 rhetoric flipped it.

California is the holdout.

The state-level Republican Party in California has not built the kind of mail-in operation that Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania Republicans now have.

That’s a strategic choice, not a structural inevitability.

When California Republicans build the operation, they’ll capture more of the mail-in vote. Until they do, Democrats will keep winning the late-counted batches.

If conservatives in California want different results, the answer is the same answer it’s been in Florida, Arizona, and Pennsylvania: build mail-in infrastructure.

This Has Happened Before. In This Exact Race.

For anyone tempted to believe Pratt’s vanishing lead is unprecedented or suspicious, the precedent is right there in the same city, four years ago.

In June 2022, Los Angeles ran the same mayoral primary, with one candidate (Rick Caruso) running on tougher policing and clearing encampments, and the other (Karen Bass) representing the progressive establishment.

Caruso led on election night by 5 percentage points. He celebrated with confetti at his election night party. Pundits declared him the surprise star of the night.

Two weeks later, Caruso was trailing Bass by 7 points. The swing was 12 percentage points, entirely from mail-in ballots counted after Election Day. Bass went on to win the runoff in November and become mayor.

The Los Angeles Times wrote a piece at the time titled “California primary’s lesson for pundits: Don’t speak too soon in the age of mail-in voting.”

Political consultant Michael Trujillo gave the quote that ages perfectly for this moment: “If your race is within 10 points at the end of election night, it’s probably premature to call it a win. If you’re up 20 points, you’re probably safe.”

Pratt’s election-night lead over Raman was about 6 percentage points.

By the rule established in the last LA mayoral race, that lead was always going to be vulnerable to exactly the kind of mail-in shift that’s now happening.

What’s happening in the Pratt-Raman race is not anomalous. It’s the third documented instance in less than a decade of the same exact pattern playing out in California, with the same exact partisan implications.

If this pattern is fraud, it’s been fraud for a decade.

Across multiple election cycles. Affecting multiple races.

Documented in mainstream media at the time. Studied by academic institutions.

Predicted by political consultants who work in the state.

None of those entities have produced evidence the pattern is anything other than what it appears to be: the structural consequence of mail-in voting demographics combined with California’s counting timeline.

The boring explanation isn’t only more likely on first principles. It’s likely been the actual explanation every other time this has happened.

A Note for My Conservative Readers

I want to be clear about something before going further, because I know what I’m asking you to accept is uncomfortable.

I’m telling you that California’s election system is not rigged. I’m not telling you that California’s election system is fair, or that Democrats are operating in good faith, or that the structural advantages they’ve built are accidental.

I’m highlighting that there’s a difference between fraud and systemic design.

Democrats designed California’s election system to favor outcomes they wanted.

The auto-mailed ballots. The 30-day canvass. The legal ballot harvesting. The same-day registration. The voter roll maintenance practices.

Each of these individually has a defensible rationale.

The cumulative effect is a system that advantages Democratic-aligned political infrastructure (mail-in turnout, ballot curing, organized canvassing) over Republican-aligned infrastructure (Election Day voting, in-person turnout).

The same pattern shows up in other areas conservatives have legitimately complained about for years.

Take the southern border. The Democratic position has not been “we want millions of people voting illegally.”

The Democratic position has been functionally equivalent to: we benefit electorally from population growth in blue states, from eventual citizenship pathways for immigrants, and from generational demographic shifts that have historically favored Democrats.

Census counts shape House apportionment and Electoral College votes. Amnesty creates new voters. None of this requires anyone to vote illegally. All of it produces electoral advantages over time.

It’s not fraud. It’s politics.

Is this a power grab? Yes. Both parties do power grabs through systemic design.

Republicans are currently doing it through congressional district maps. Democrats designed immigration policy and California’s election system.

The structural complaint is legitimate and worth fighting through actual political channels.

But “Democrats designed systems that favor them” is a completely different claim than “Democrats are committing mass fraud.” That is an accusation that requires evidence.

The reason this distinction matters: if you conflate the two claims, you weaken both arguments.

The legitimate critique of structural advantages gets tarred by association with the fraud claims that don’t have evidence. People who would otherwise engage with the structural critique dismiss everything because they associate it with conspiracy theorizing.

You can be angry about systemic design without claiming fraud.

In fact, that’s the only honest position when there’s no evidence of fraud. The system can be unfair and not rigged at the same time.

The “Smoking Gun” That Wasn’t

There’s such a thing as healthy skepticism, and what we’re seeing online from the right-wing ecosystem isn’t it.

The most viral fraud claim from this race is a perfect illustration of how unhealthy skepticism operates, and worth walking through carefully because it shows the pattern we need to learn to recognize.

On election night, the Associated Press’s automated data feed pulled vote updates from LA County in two separate updates one minute apart.

The first update showed thousands of new votes for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, and zero new votes for Spencer Pratt.

Screenshots flew across social media. Statistical analyses were run showing it was impossibly unlikely for a candidate running second to receive zero votes in a batch.

One minute later, the second update came in. It showed thousands of new votes for Spencer Pratt and zero for Bass or Raman.

When the AP issued its official statement, the actual combined batch showed 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass, and 9,521 votes for Raman.

Pratt received more votes than either Democrat in the batch that “proved” he was being cheated.

The central “evidence” was a one-minute gap between two automated updates from a third-party data provider. The full combined batch actually showed Pratt receiving more votes than either Democrat. The screenshots that went viral captured the gap between the two updates. By the time the AP released the full picture, the screenshots had already gone everywhere and the narrative had hardened.

Sit with that for a moment.

The central piece of evidence cited by people calling fraud was a one-minute display lag in third-party software pulling government data.

And it spread because people wanted it to be true.

This is what cherry-picking looks like in practice, and cherry-picking is one of the cognitive biases I’ll go deeper on in the paid section.

The mechanism is simple: you find one piece of data that supports your preferred conclusion, you isolate it from its context, and you treat it as decisive. Everything around it that would have complicated the picture gets ignored.

It’s also a textbook example of what philosophers call the argument from incredulity. The structure is: “I can’t imagine how this could happen without fraud, therefore fraud.”

It treats personal inability to imagine an alternative as evidence about the world. It isn’t. It’s evidence about the limits of our imagination, often combined with unwillingness to explore reasons why we might be wrong.

Anyone with a phone in their pocket can construct a non-fraud explanation in less time than it takes to post an outraged tweet.

You can open any AI model and ask: “What’s the best non-fraud explanation for a Republican candidate leading on election night in California and losing as mail-in ballots are counted?”

The model will walk you through the blue shift, the demographic patterns, the organizational asymmetries. The information is free and instantly available.

The failure isn’t access. The failure is willingness.

Constructing the strongest counter-explanation requires entertaining the possibility that your gut reaction was wrong. That’s uncomfortable. The bandwagon of agreement on social media is comfortable.

Outrage gets attention. Steel-manning doesn’t.

The Occam’s Razor Test

Occam’s Razor is the principle that when multiple explanations are possible for the same set of facts, the one requiring the fewest additional assumptions is most likely correct. It’s a principle of formal reasoning that dates back to the 14th century and has held up across nearly every domain of human inquiry.

Apply it here.

To believe systemic fraud has produced the Pratt-Raman result, you have to:

1. Assume coordinated action across thousands of election workers, signature verifiers, county officials, third-party data providers like the AP, and observers from multiple campaigns.

2. Assume this coordination has been operating across multiple election cycles spanning over a decade.

3. Assume it has affected multiple different races with different stakes.

4. Assume not a single major whistleblower has emerged in any of those cycles.

5. Assume the results just happen to perfectly match documented demographic patterns.

6. Assume the conspiracy is invisible to every Republican observer at every level.

To believe the boring explanation, you have to assume:

1. California is the most Democratic state in the country (well-documented).

2. Mail-in voters skew younger and more progressive (well-documented).

3. Republicans abandoned mail-in voting after Trump’s 2020 rhetoric (well-documented).

4. Democrats invested heavily in mail-in turnout operations (well-documented).

5. Late-counted ballots are disproportionately mail-in (mathematically required).

6. Spencer Pratt is widely perceived in California as a Trump-aligned figure who motivates anti-Trump turnout (well-documented).

Every component of the boring explanation is individually documented. The fraud explanation requires accepting a multi-year, multi-race conspiracy with zero leaks, producing results that happen to look exactly like what the boring explanation predicts.

The fraud claim isn’t impossible. Things that look like one thing sometimes turn out to be something else.

But the fraud claim requires vastly more assumptions to be true. That makes it vastly less likely to be the correct explanation. Not impossible. Less likely.

This is the discipline Occam’s Razor demands. Not certainty in either direction. Weighting probabilities by how many assumptions each explanation requires.

The simpler explanation wins until positive evidence forces a reconsideration. That positive evidence has not emerged.

This doesn’t prove fraud is impossible. It shows why the burden of proof is on the fraud explanation over the boring explanation.

What’s in the Paid Section

Here’s why I point out the specific errors in reasoning people are committing so you don’t make the same mistake as them.

Next, I go deep on the seven cognitive biases and logical fallacies driving the fraud narrative, with the specific mechanism of each one and how to recognize it operating in your own thinking.

• Anchoring bias.

• Cherry-picking.

• Confirmation bias.

• Motivated reasoning.

• The argument from incredulity.

• Tribal asymmetry.

• The bandwagon effect.

By the end of the letter, you’ll understand how to use these to sharpen your critical thinking and your ability to discuss these issues with your loved ones - including those you disagree with.