California Election Fraud? (Pt 2)

Fans of this podcast will know that last week I went off script. I stopped talking about backups and cyber recovery, and I talked about California and, um, you know, what's going on here in the elections in California. A- at this point, it's now been a week later, I got some comments. I got a lot of views on that, uh, and a lot of listens on that particular episode, and I'm, I'm glad for that.

I, I hope that it helped some people. But, I also got a lot of comments, and I got a lot of comments about, um, you know, other or specific claims about, voter fraud. And th- th- some of them are, are crazy. Um, almost all of them are completely false.

And, um, almost all of them are based on a tiny… Like, like any good lie, right? It's based on a tiny, uh, morsel of truth. And in one case, believe it or not, I was as surprised as you will be, one of them, possibly the craziest one, was actually true. you'll have to wait till the end.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna save the, the good stuff, to the end. and so I'm gonna do, an episode on the specific claims of voter fraud. And, I'm gonna give you the details. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give references so that you can, you can check my work, right?

Um, I don't, I don't want you to believe me. Just go directly to the source of data. And, and most of these things, uh, they just make no sense, if you actually understand how things actually work here or if you just sort of apply some logic. but, um, but again, I, I, I'll show my work, uh, when I can.

I wanna talk especially about the mayoral race in Los Angeles, because that, for some reason, got a ton of attention. and probably because, in this case, Spencer Pratt, the Republican candidate, did not make the primary. Here in California, we have what, what's called a jungle primary, where we don't have party or b- primary… This is for state races, that we, we don't have a, sort of a typical primary. We have a jungle primary, which means the top two people who get the most votes advance to the general election.

And if those two people happen to be from the same party, so be it. And, believe it or not, a few months ago, you know, the way things were looking, we were actually, thinking that we were going to get an all-Republican race, uh, before - Because Eric Swalwell was not looking good in the polls and, um, um, Steve Hilton was looking better. And, Chad Bianco, which is the sheriff in Riverside, uh, was looking better than Eric Swalwell, which, who was the leading candidate at the time.

But Eric Swalwell dropped out for, SA allegations and, rightly so. and that basically blew things up, and there was a toss-up, and then suddenly, Becerra became much more popular, in the Democrat side. And so we ended up with a very different race on the governor side. My point is that there was a time when we thought we were actually gonna end up with, um, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco as the two candidates for, uh, governor.

That there were too, basically there were too many Democrat candidates, and they were splitting up the vote. And, um, and so that's how we thought we were gonna end up with, uh, those two candidates. But things changed after Eric Swalwell dropped out. the popularity, centered around Becerra and, Tom Steyer what ended up happening there was just like often happens in California, because you get a lot of people who vote early and a lot of, uh, Republicans… Basically, w- this happened in both the governor's race and the mayor race, but the LA mayor race, but the results were different.

So what happens is that the Republicans are being told by their leadership you should vote on or before the Election Day, and you should vote in person, and you should vote, you know, that, that basically they have this strong belief that your ballot should get in by Election Day, that, that waiting till the last possible minute to drop off your ballot is, is somehow wrong, even though it's in keeping with California law. And so Republicans tend to either vote in person at the polls or, m- send in their mail ballot early.

And, um, whereas Democrats, especially in this particular election, were voting very strategically, and they didn't have a problem with putting in a last-minute ba- mail ballot, and that's really important to understand. And, and by the way, that what I just said comes fr- the, the statement i- is just, that's a, it's a big generalization and not everybody did that, but I think the data bears that out. You see what happened in the, the state race, and you see what happened in the mayor race.

and I, I can now talk about it in the past tense. So what happened was you saw a lot of ba- it, there was a huge surge of mail-in ballots dropped off on or just before Election Day, and that meant that they had to, validate the signatures on a ton of ballots. So in case of San Diego County, it was roughly 800,000 ballots that were turned in on Election Day. Actually a very small number, last time I checked it was, like, 30,000 that came in after Election Day.

But again, in California, as long as it's, postmarked by Election Day and received within a week of Election Day, those ballots would still be counted. and yes, I know that there's a Supreme Court case, on the docket right now, uh, trying to see whether or not, that, the Supreme Court decides that that's legal. so you had this s- big surge, and because of how, Republicans tend to vote, the surge, and the votes that would then be verified after Election Day, not just the ones that came in after Election Day, but just the verif- the ballots that all came in on Election Day, they tended to lean Democratic in California, and even more so in, uh, Los Angeles.

And so the results, um, were different between the two, and, and there was… There were all these accusations of, of fraud because it's, it's statistically impossible. That was a phrase I saw all last week. It's statistically impossible for it s- to rocket off like that. The only way is that they're making up votes and, and, um, or they're, or they're not counting.

That was i- that was basically all the conspiracy theories were one way or the other. Either they're making up fake votes or they're not counting, real votes for the Republican candidates, and neither of those things has any basis in fact. and, um, so one of the things that you saw, and you see it still repeated to this day, was there was this one moment when there was a vote count reported, by the Associated Press where, the, um, the s- one of the candidates got a, they use the word a tranche of ballots, right?

they tend to report them in batches, right? In San Diego, they do them once a day. and then there was this one moment, and I do say moment, where they had added something like 30,000 ballots to, Nithya Raman and, the, and zero ballots to Spencer Pratt. People made a comment, and then, the AP realized it was a reporting error, and they fixed the reporting error.

The, there… If you look at the official record on the Los Angeles site that's, you know, this, tranche by tranche, there is no time when a bunch of votes got added to one candidate and no votes added to Spencer Pratt. It was simply a reporting error. AP has said it's a reporting error. It was investigated by the, um, the, US attorney, and, it's just not an event.

but people keep bringing it up, okay? So that's just, that's just completely false. the other is this idea that, it's the opposite of this, and that is that, uh, you're seeing claims on, on social media that tens of thousands of Spencer Pratt voters are having their mail ballots rejected for signature verification. And the implication there is that they're just rejecting the Sim- the Spencer Pratt votes, and that if they had just accepted the Spencer Pratt votes, that, that Spencer Pratt could have won over, uh, Nithya Raman.

And the thing is that neither of those things are true so the first reason that it's not true is that the ballots are all in the same colored envelope, right? Uh, regardless of your party, your, um, your mail-in ballot comes in, it looks exactly the same as the other person's mail-in ballot. And the ballot isn't opened, and isn't… No one looks inside that ballot until the signature verification process is complete. And so the idea that they were somehow figuring out what was in these mail ballots and then rejecting ballots because they were Spencer Pratt is simply not possible, because they, because that's just not how it works, right?

the signature verification process happens before the envelope is ever opened, so the idea that they could somehow reject just Spencer Pratt votes is simply not possible. And second Even if that was the case, which it's not, even if that was the case, the number of votes that were rejected for signature issues, were 12,702 in the entire Los Angeles County, which means that for the Los Angeles mayor, it's gonna be some number less than that. With the, the LA County, s- didn't give a, a number for the Los Angeles city, but they gave a number for Los Angeles County.

And, that was the margin of votes between, Pratt and Raman was 30,000. So even if all 12,700 votes, which weren't even all Los Angeles city votes, even if all of them were Spencer Pratt votes, and then they all passed signature verification, and they were all added to it, it wouldn't have changed the results of the race. So that's just completely false from beginning to end, and makes absolutely no sense. I would also like to just point out, this isn't, like, a, it's not one of the claims that I'm refuting, but this idea that why in the world, i- if the Democrat Party wanted to, the fix was in, what they want is they, th- they want this person in, okay?

So if they wanted the Democrat, th- obviously they have a preferred Democrat, whether it's Bass or Raman, they have a preferred Democrat. If they wanted to fix the election, then they would've more than likely, again, they didn't do this, but if they would have, they would've fixed it so that they were running against Pratt, because in Los Angeles, it's one of the most liberal cities in the United States, they, they would've set it up so that the pref- their preferred candidate, whether that was Bass or Raman, was running against Pratt, because he just isn't going to get enough votes in Los Angeles County to, to win.

Uh, it's just not gonna happen. And, the, um, And so if they wanted to fix the election, that's the way they would've fixed it. They wouldn't have kicked him out. Now what we have is we have a, the current mayor is now battling a very popular, very progressive candidate.

This is honestly a toss-up. Who knows what's gonna be the results of this race? so if somebody was trying to fix things, they sure didn't fix it very well, I also wanna just, again, going back to the mayoral race, I think it's really important to note that Spencer Pratt got 26% of the vote. Why does that matter?

Ask yourself What percentage of the vote did Donald Trump get when he was running for president in Los Angeles County? You know what that percentage was? 27%. So Spencer Pratt got almost exactly the same percentage of votes that Donald Trump got in the 2024 election.

uh, it's just nonsense, Again, no basis in fact. now let's talk about the fact that there was a surge of ballots, both in the, in the, um, the, the governor race and the ma- the LA mayor race. there was a surge and there was a sort of a one candidate took off, at a much greater rate than, than the Republican candidate, right? So in the case of, the governor race, Becerra really took off after the election and they started verifying signatures, and, uh, Steyer took off at a faster rate than, Hilton, but not at a rate enough to catch up to him and overtake him the way that things happen in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, if you look at the votes, actually after the election, There was sort of a rocket-like, phenomenon on Raman. so a lot of people are like, "Look at that." It's, again, statistically impossible. She's more popular than Bass in the second, in the, the latter half of thing when they were counting votes.

So let's just talk about this. the first one with the, with the governor's race, it's just the red mirage. It's the s- I talked about this on the last episode. Republicans tend to vote earlier because they think that's the right thing to do.

They think that the way the Democrats are voting in California is just fundamentally wrong. I've talked to a lot of them online. It's just, it's just wrong, right? It's just wrong the way they vote in California, and so they tend to vote early or they tend to vote in person, which means that the bulk, not all, but more than not, the mail-in ballots, especially ones turned in towards the end, are going to lean heavily Democratic.

And so it's not, it's not a surprise. This is why they call it the red mirage, right? The same thing happened to Donald Trump in 2020. They had initially thought he was winning, but then as they started counting the mail ballots in some states, then, the, you know, he ended up losing that particular election.

but what happened in the mayor race was, I think if you don't have any context, if you just look at it without any knowledge of the way Democrats were thinking in, California, then, it does look a little suspect, okay? So let me explain what I think happened. Again, I don't have proof for this, but when I look at the numbers, this is what I think happened. I do have some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the same thing happened to Styer that happened to, Raman.

it's just the results were different. So I talked to more than a handful of people who were voting for not their preferred candidate. In this case, they were voting for Styer and not Becerra, I don't live in Los Angeles. I, I didn't speak to any LA voters, but, I did speak to people who were voting for, Styer even though they wanted Becerra to win.

Now, why would they do that? It makes no sense. The reason was that at some point, especially later in the race, uh, meaning as we were getting close to the election, it looked like Becerra was in, right? Becerra was going to, to win, so he was definitely gonna be in the top two.

And so because of the jungle primary, people said, "Well, if he's gonna win, I'd like to see if we can kick the, the Republican out. I'd like to see if we can oust the Republican due to the jungle primary out of the governor's race altogether," the, like what happened in Los Angeles. And so they voted for Styer even though when it came to the general election, they were gonna vote for Becerra. I talked to multiple voters who were doing exactly that.

I partic- I personally, I disagree with that tactic. I would rather vote for the guy that I think, that I think should win or, and I want to win, and I would v- I would vote for that candidate. I'm not a fan of the jungle primary, I'll just say that. I'd rather have a person of each party and let them duke it out in the general.

But, I, I… To me, that's a risky vote. but I talked to multiple people that's what they're doing. Now let's go over to, the mayor race. So, and here we have an incumbent, right?

So, the incumbent Bass, again, the polls were saying she's in there, right? She's going to, essentially win the primary. She's gonna get the most votes in the primary. So, really all we're arguing about is the second vote, that she's, you know, that she's popular enough as the current mayor that she was going to be in there, right?

And This is what I think happened. I don't know this 'cause I didn't talk to anybody specifically, but I th- but I think they did the same thing with Raman that they did with Stier. They want, they wanted Bass to win, or maybe they'd be okay with either candidate, but what they really wanted was they wanted for the Republican not to be in the primary at all. They'd be comfortable with either Democrat, but they don't want the Republican in the primary at all.

And so they knew Bass was gonna get enough votes to be qual- to qualify, and so they went ahead at, towards the end, right at the end, right? They put in a ballot, not just a Democratic ballot, but a ballot for Raman. And, and they mailed, they mailed some of those at the last minute, or they put them in at the last minute, and the result was that once they started counting mail ballots, actually Raman took off like a rocket, um, at a higher rate than Bass did, and she took off fast enough to, To overtake Spencer Pratt It, it makes perfect sense to me.

Again, I know that there are plenty of you probably listening that are saying, you know, "You shouldn't do it that way." Well, that's the way we do it here in California, and it makes sense. It doesn't, to me, it doesn't in any way spell fraud. It just says that, the way we do ballots in California, that there were… I definitely know people that were strategically voting and giving that other vote to the other candidate, and I think that's what happened in her case.

Will she win in the p- in the actual general? Who knows, right? so that's the whole late surge thing. So here's another one, and it sounds kinda crazy, and it's the one that has the most kernel of truth so far.

And that is, "Man, over there in California, you can just register to vote with a gym membership card." And that's not true at all, but it sort of is. So here's what it is. When you register to vote in California, you need to give identifying information, so because when you're filling out an application to register or you're filling out a conditional voter registration at the polls, you need to give enough information for them to verify that you are a real person, and a resident of California.

And, um, now notice I did not mention citizenship status there, and I'm gonna be very open here. I I don't wanna speak for the different registrars, but I couldn't find any evidence that there was any attempt, official attempt, to verify the citizenship status of people when they register. They just have to, under penalty of perjury, certify that they are a citizen, right? And doing so, if you're not a citizen, is a felony, right?

And then voting with that registration would then be another felony. and again, th- there have been… and I'm gonna s- some of you are listening and go, "Aha! There it is. There's the fraud."

No. There's the possibility of fraud, sure. But, there's no evidence of any significant amount of non-citizens voting, and trust me, groups have looked for that. and I also wanna throw this out, is, is they're like, "Oh, so crazy there in California.

You, you know, they no rules, no whatever." again, I researched this, and what I found was that only six states require proof of citizenship to vote It's not just crazy California, right? it, they, again, most states, the bulk of states, they simply require that you, under penalty of perjury, certify that you are a citizen. One of the reasons for this is that it's actually quite difficult to electronically prove you're a citizen.

So the, the… And this is what the whole discussion around The SAVE Act. proving you're a citizen can be challenging for a lot of people. I don't wanna spend too much time on this, but just suffice it to say that it's, it's not that easy to prove that you're a citizen for certain groups of people, especially married women and older people who, were born i- in various states in different times when getting easy access to your birth records is not easy, or if you've changed your name or, all sorts of things, right?

Or if you, um, there's just a bunch of people where that is not the case. Anyway, I just want you to understand that, that the majority of states, all but six that I could find, do the same thing as California, where they require you to affirm. Now, what is this gym membership thing? So here's the thing.

There was this, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, I believe it was, and this was back after The Gore-Bush election. And the, this act did a bunch of things. Uh, one of the things it did was it, it got rid of the punch card ballots. Remember the hanging chad, right?

and by the way, just, you know, as a computer person, chad is a plural word, like confetti. There's no such thing as a hanging chad. Anyway, a piece of chad, sure. But anyway.

you remember that. The HAVA, HAVA Act, Help America Vote Act, it did a bunch of things like set standards for paper ballots, and require paper ballots, and, uh, get rid of voting machines, which is a, a machine where you vote on and it stores your vote, and that. So we got rid of those. and, um- because the Constitution does specify that the time and manner of elections is determined by the states, except where laws are passed by Congress, okay?

and this was an example where Congress basically just came out and said, "You've gotta, you've gotta do this. You, you can't use these punch card ballots. We got too many problems of them in Florida, and, uh, so you gotta do that." But one of the things that it also stated was it stated, uh, some requirements on mail registration and, um, CVRs, conditional voter registrations.

And it said that if you do this, you need to give them a unique number, so use their driver's license. They'll ask for their Social Security number or some state ID number. you need to give them a number, and then Someone needs to check ID the first time they vote in, a national election. And the, there is a list of, of IDs, as I make quotes, things that can help verify your identity, um, that is eligible in many states I will agree that the list is longer in California.

and one thing on that list, so assuming you registered to vote, assuming your identity was verified e- electronically, not your citizenship, but your identity was verified, now you're coming to vote for the first time, you need to verify that the person standing in front of them is the person that filled out the application. And one of the things on that, called a HAVA ID list, is a gym membership card. And, I, and I'm sure some of you are like, "Aha, see, uh, you know, First off, let me just tell you something.

As somebody who's worked every election for the last 10 years in California, and I train in every election on HAVA ID requirements. They're like, if when you go to, if when you go to check somebody in, it's gonna, it's gonna beep up and it's gonna say, "HAVA ID required," here's what to do. In 10 years, I have never seen a HAVA ID. I, and not just me, but I'm a site manager, and I tell them, "If anybody ever sees a HAVA ID, I wanna know about it."

Since we changed things in California, we almost never do provisionals. If you - I tell them, "If you do a provisional, probably something's wrong, so call me over," right? So if we ever had a HAVA ID, I would know, and I've never seen one. So my point is, this is a really rare scenario of this person has never, no one has ever seen this person with an ID, and so now we need to verify that the person standing in front of it, so it's called a HAVA ID check.

And in that one scenario, the only thing we need to verify is that is the person, and what we're loo - And one of the things that's on that list is a gym membership. Now, why is that valid? I'm not really gonna make a case for it too strong, but what I will say is that, in order to get a gym membership with a, with an ID, like that's generally going to be a, something with an automatic debit. Every gym I've joined has always wanted an automatic debit, which means you have, they, they need to identify with who you are.

You need to sign a contract. The contract needs to match the bank that they're gonna do an automatic debit from. So it's a little bit more valuable than you might think. In other states, and in California, you can also use things like a utility bill, right?

I would argue that the utility bill is a whole lot easier to forge than a gym, you know, a laminated gym membership card with a, uh, with an ID. But anyway, that's what the whole gym membership card thing is. Okay the, um, the next thing that I saw is Nithya Raman, there's no way that she got as many votes. She didn't even carry her own district.

Well, that's just false, right? the, like, you will say that she lost 54 out of 66 precincts in the California District 4, which is her district. You're like, "Well, look, she, she lost." But here it's, th- this is, if you've been following this, one of the things you hear is land doesn't vote, people do.

She did win in the populous districts in her, in her own district. She did win her district, okay? and, um, and when she was elected to city council, she, there was a runoff, and she got more than half of that runoff. and so this idea that she lost, the, her own district, and then how could she possibly win the, the city?

one other crazy thing that has come up a lot, and that People on Skid Row are being paid to vote, and that is false. "But I saw a video." Yeah, you saw a video. And by the way, some people were being paid to do something.

It was that they weren't being paid to vote. so what was going on there? And by the way, what was going on was wrong, was a crime, and the woman has pled guilty so in California, we have this concept of, of petitions and that you can get anything on the ballot, if you get enough signatures. For example, in November, we do have voter ID on the ballot for the November general election, right?

and, and also the, if that passes, they would require, them to check for citizenship when people register to vote. so she was a paid petitioner, meaning a person who goes out to get signatures for a petition. And, and that is legal to pay someone to go out and get signatures, and it is very common to pay them by the signature. But California law requires anyone who signs these petitions to be a registered voter.

So, she was doing two things that I can see in the video. I watched multiple videos. I saw two things going on. One, that, she… if people weren't registered to vote she was allowing them to register to vote, basically fill out the paperwork to register to vote, and once they had done that, they were then a registered voter, and so they could sign their name on the petition.

and then the second one, uh, and I don't know which of these is worse, but the second one is she had a list of registered voters, and she was then having them impersonate those registered voters and sign their name, on the petition And she would give them the name that they're supposed to sign and, uh, and the address. So, in the case of the first one, there's nothing wrong with getting them to register to vote. There's nothing wrong with the fact that they were on Skid Row, that they were homeless, that they were unhoused, whatever w- whatever word you wanna use there.

That is not illegal to, to help homeless people register to vote. Homeless people are allowed to vote without a, an address, right? They do need to verify their identity, but, again, one of the things that I'm trained to do is to help an unhoused person, do a conditional voter registration. We find out where they are currently living, even if that's a tent on the corner of A and B, and the reason for that is that we need to know where they live so that we know which, races they're gonna vote on.

we identify physically where they are sleeping, and then that's the race that they get to vote on. I'm absolutely sure that some of you think, "Well, that's just crazy." That's the way we do it here, and actually I think, I'm willing to guess that many states have a formal policy for what to do with, homeless people and, their ability to vote. And I'm sure that there are probably some other states that say you have to have a, a, you know, a stationary address or whatever.

So what she was doing is that she, if they wanted to register to vote, she was allowing them to use her address or a central address to register to vote. What she was doing is she was paying them to do that. She was paying them like $2 to $5 to register to vote, and that is a federal crime, okay? That's what she was charged with, paying people to register to vote.

The other thing that she was doing, which is she was having them impersonate, the, somebody in order to sign a state petition. That is a felony within California. I haven't heard, anything there, but, uh, in terms of what they're doing with that. But she, um, But people are like, "Ah, see?

Voter fraud." Not really. Not, at least not the type of voter fraud that we've been talking about. This is technically voter fraud because you're doing stuff with voters, but nobody was being paid.

There's… I don't, I find no evidence that she was paying anybody to vote. She was paying them to register just so they could sign the petition that she's getting paid by the signature for. and, um, and by the way, even if they were paid to vote, they're not gonna get mail ballots because they don't have a regular address. and so they would have to go in person, and if they go in person, then they're gonna be in a booth all by themselves.

So if you're paid to vote for a particular candidate, you go into a booth, no one's gonna know that you voted or didn't vote for that particular candidate, so it'd be a really weird thing to do. you could strongly encourage that they vote for somebody, but you… There's just no way to know what they end up doing. But again, I saw no evidence that she was paying people to vote, which is something that I heard alleged 100 times in the last week Okay, I promised you a good one. I promised you one that turned out to actually be true, and this is it There was a woman in Orange County that successfully registered her dog to vote and voted as the dog.

And when she did this, she said that she was doing it to make a point. She is one of those who thinks that we do things wrong here, and she proved her point by, by successfully registering her dog to vote and then voting as that dog. And she's like, "See? Voter fraud."

And we're like, "Yeah, voter fraud, that's a felony." She was convicted and sentenced for that crime, okay? so is this not evidence of voter fraud? It is evidence that there was a single incident of voter fraud that was done on purpose to make a point.

It's still not evidence that there is widespread voter fraud. I will agree, uh, you know, I think I've already agreed that, that should not have happened, And I hope that in Orange County, which is right up the road here, that they need to do a better job of verifying the identity of a person. I will say that when you have, in San Diego County's case, two million voters, you may make mistakes, right? In any large data size, you're going to have mistakes.

Even if we had, some sort of citizenship, uh, verification, I think there still may be mistakes. So, that mistake was made and, uh, and it's wrong that that mistake was made. I do think it's important to point out that she was flagged and that she, she was convicted, and then she is, uh, being sentenced for that crime. and by the way, the same is true, I thought I, I'm glad I brought this, the same is true of a handful of people who actually, I don't know if you, some of you saw this on, um, social media, people saying that because they don't check ID in California, we're just gonna go over there, we're gonna fly over to California, and we're gonna vote for Spencer Pratt because they don't check ID in California.

the thing is, we do check ID in California That's right. We check ID. Not in the way you think, meaning we don't check your ID, your, a card, but we do identify you when you come to vote. You have to fill out a conditional voter registration to vote, and if you are then found to be falsifying that voter registration, that is a felony.

And, um, there, there were a few people that were caught attempting to do that, and they are being prosecuted. So speaking of prosecuting and, the Justice Department, another thing that is cited as evidence that things are, topsy-turvy over in California is that the, Justice Department is opening up an investigation in California. just the fact that you, that the, the Department of Justice is saying that they're going to open an investigation, and they're saying things like, and we expect some arrests.

the fact that investigation has allegedly, because we don't actually know if it's been open or if they're just saying they're gonna open investigation, that means absolutely nothing So that's it. that's what I got. I'm gonna put as, as much as I can up here in terms of the, the evidence and stuff. uh, I'll put it on the website and I'll put it in the, in the video version of this.

But, again, with one exception, no ex- no actual, proof of any kind of voter fraud, and perfectly valid explanations for the other things that you saw. Uh, with that, I'm gonna get back to my regularly scheduled programming next week.