Spencer Pratt Slipping – and Why Slow Counts Are Not Necessarily Fraud
Five days after the polls closed, Los Angeles still hasn’t settled its mayor’s race between Karen Bass, Nithya Raman, and Spencer Pratt — and Pratt’s election-night lead over Raman has narrowed all week as late ballots are counted. The speed of a count, by itself, tells you nothing about whether it’s honest. In 2004, Washington’s governor’s race flipped twice across a machine recount and a hand recount — Rossi by 261, then 42, then Gregoire by 129 — and the courts found no fraud. In 2008, Minnesota’s Senate race took an eight-month recount to settle 312 votes, and the seat sat empty half a year. Both were slow. Both were clean.
But slow doesn’t mean clean either. Fraud is real, and you prove it with evidence, not a stopwatch: in 2018 a North Carolina operative was caught harvesting absentee ballots and the election was thrown out, and just last month a Marina del Rey woman agreed to plead guilty in federal court to paying people — some of them homeless — to register to vote. We do not know how widespread that was, or whether it touched this count at all; the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California says multiple investigations are underway. The honest position is to demand evidence in both directions — because foreign adversaries have a long history of wanting American elections to look dirty, which is exactly why high standards and skepticism are national security assets.
Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst with 30 years of strategic intelligence practice, personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
Washington gubernatorial election, 2004 — certified hand recount, December 2004 (Washington Secretary of State)
Minnesota U.S. Senate election, 2008 — Minnesota Supreme Court ruling, June 30, 2009
North Carolina State Board of Elections — order for a new election, 9th Congressional District, February 2019
United States v. Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong — U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of California (plea agreement), 2026
U.S. Attorney’s Office, C.D. Cal. / FBI Los Angeles — multiple election-fraud investigations stated June 5, 2026 (The Washington Post; The Spokesman-Review)
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder — 2026 primary canvass, results.lavote.gov
California vote-count timeline — KTLA, PBS NewsHour, June 2026
