LA is Doomed

I landed in Los Angeles after one month in Poland, and within twenty-four hours the political machine introduced itself to me with all the subtlety of a two-by-four to the face. I walked into an election vote center and was greeted by a poll worker who looked as though she were withdrawing from a potent street drug. She was wrapped in a blanket that covered her head. Half her face was hidden behind a mask. She shivered and stared at me and the other voters with wide, unblinking eyes—the look of a crazed homeless person wandering the streets of Santa Monica at three in the morning. This was the face of the California state election. This was the official representative of civic participation in the second-largest city in the United States. I had just come from Wroclaw, where I never once saw either a druggie or a mask-wearer, either in a government office or on the street. The contrast was not merely unflattering. It was damning.

Now here we are, more than one week after the polls closed on June second, and we are told that voting will continue—that ballots will be counted for thirty days until a final result is certified. On election night, Spencer Pratt—a political outsider who lost his home in the Palisades fire and ran against the incumbent on a platform of basic competence—held a six-point lead over City Councilwoman Nithya Raman for second place. Within days, as mail-in ballots were dumped into the count in batches of tens of thousands, Raman erased that lead entirely. Of the more than fifty-eight thousand late-counted ballots, Raman captured over forty percent. Pratt received less than eighteen percent. A candidate who was in single digits on election night is now reportedly leading him and will face incumbent Karen Bass in November. The only candidate who represented a departure from the machine has been methodically removed from the race by the same mechanism that has determined every California election since 2020: mail-in ballots counted days and weeks after the polls close, trending overwhelmingly in one direction.