Two Centuries of the Same Playbook: How Spencer Pratt's Lead Died in the Late Count

Jimmy Carter's Own Commission Already Warned Us About the Mail Ballot

Consider what an election actually is. Beneath the rallies and the slogans, a free election is a measuring instrument. It takes the scattered preferences of millions of citizens and resolves them into a single public number, and like any instrument its worth depends entirely on its accuracy. A thermometer that can be nudged tells you nothing about the temperature. A vote count that can be padded tells you nothing about the will of the people. The whole moral weight of self-government rests on one assumption, that the instrument reports what the citizens actually said. So when a count behaves strangely, the correct response is neither blind faith nor panic. It is the scrutiny any careful person brings to a gauge that has produced a suspicious reading.

The Los Angeles mayoral primary of June 2026 produced such a reading. On election night, the insurgent Republican Spencer Pratt sat in second place behind Mayor Karen Bass, holding a lead of roughly six points over Councilwoman Nithya Raman and positioned for a one-on-one November runoff. Then the late batches arrived. Day after day, the successive tallies leaned more Democratic, and by Sunday, June 7, Raman had passed Pratt by 3,113 votes, 27.12% to 26.69%, after several days trailing in third. The man who led when the polls closed was, once the counting finished, edged out of contention entirely. The mechanism was the late tabulation of mail ballots in a jurisdiction where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly four to one.

Now I can hear the objection, because it is the first thing every defender of the system says. This is simply how California counts. Mail ballots are processed last, late ballots tend to lean Democratic, and the so-called shift is a benign artifact of sequence, not evidence of anything wrong. Fair enough. No court has found fraud in Los Angeles, and I am not asserting one did. But notice what the objection quietly concedes. It admits that the outcome of a race can hinge entirely on a category of ballots cast outside the supervised polling place, counted days after the public has gone home, in exactly the channel where the documented abuses of American history have always concentrated. The benign explanation and the sinister one share the same anatomy. That is precisely why the pattern deserves a hard look rather than a reflexive shrug.

For the pattern is not new, and this is the heart of the matter. The claim that election fraud is a fever dream invented in 2020 collapses the moment one opens the historical record, because the record is long, it is adjudicated, and it produces convictions. The continuity is the story. The same tools surface in case after case, separated by a century or more. Operatives collect and complete absentee ballots. Votes are cast in the names of the dead, the imprisoned, and the departed. A razor-thin contest is reversed days after the polls close by ballots that materialize from outside the ordinary in-person count. The argument here is not that every Democrat is a fraudster, which would be absurd and unworthy. The argument is narrower and harder to dodge. The machine wing of one party has repeatedly reached for the same instrument whenever a race was close enough to steal.

Begin with Tammany Hall. By 1868 Boss Tweed’s machine controlled the entire New York City electoral apparatus, and a congressional investigation documented repeat voting, a naturalization mill that stamped immigrants into instant Tammany voters, the destruction of opposition ballots, and outright alteration of the counts. One audit found 25,000 of 156,000 city votes fraudulent, a rate near 16%, and across 1868 to 1871 the city’s vote totals ran 8% above its entire voting population. A contemporary described the method with grim economy, the dead filling in for the sick. That is the template every later case rhymes with.

Move to 1948 and the most famous stolen election of the last century. In the Texas Democratic Senate runoff, the popular former governor Coke Stevenson appeared to have beaten Lyndon Johnson. Then, six days after the polls closed, Precinct 13 of Jim Wells County produced 202 additional votes, 200 of them for Johnson, handing him an 87-vote win out of nearly a million cast. The added names appeared in alphabetical order, in the same handwriting and ink, and several listed voters insisted they had never cast a ballot. Luis Salas, the election judge who was there, later told the Associated Press plainly that Johnson did not win that election, that it was stolen for him, and that he knew exactly how it was done. A confession from inside the machine is worth more than any outside analysis, and Johnson rode that fraudulent margin to the Senate, the vice presidency, and the White House.

Then watch the playbook migrate decisively into the absentee process, which is the development that should concern us most today. In the 1994 special election for Pennsylvania’s 2nd Senatorial District, a seat that decided control of the entire chamber, the Republican Bruce Marks led on the ballots cast in person. The Democrat William Stinson won on the absentees. A federal court found fraud so pervasive across the more than 2,600 absentee ballots, including votes cast in the names of people in Puerto Rico, in prison, and dead, that it voided the result and seated the Republican. The Third Circuit’s Judge Morton Greenberg, upholding that decision, did not reach for the soft vocabulary of irregularities. He wrote that the record made clear the election had been stolen from Marks, and that city election officials made it possible by disregarding Pennsylvania law. Stolen, by a federal judge, on the record.

The 2003 Democratic primary for mayor of East Chicago, Indiana, followed the same script. The nine-term incumbent Robert Pastrick survived on the strength of absentee ballots, and the Indiana Supreme Court found a deliberate scheme that perverted the absentee process and compromised the integrity of the election, targeting the poor, the infirm, and the limited-English. The court ordered a new election, and the challenger who had been cheated then won it in a landslide, 65% to 34%, a complete inversion of the fraudulent original. This is the clarifying detail. When the absentee corruption was stripped away and the citizens voted in the open, the result reversed entirely.

Here the skeptic owes an answer to a simple question, and it is the most powerful one in this whole debate. If mail and absentee voting were as airtight as its champions insist, why does nearly every major adjudicated fraud case in modern memory run through that exact channel? The vulnerability is not a conservative hypothesis. Courts have found it, repeatedly, in published opinions. And the channel itself is leaky even before any bad actor touches it. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of the 2008 presidential election found that 7.6 million of 35.5 million requested mail ballots were never counted, lost in transit or rejected for irregularities, a failure rate above 21%. When one in five ballots can vanish or be rejected through ordinary friction, the surface area available to harvesting, forgery, and selective rejection scales accordingly.

The most devastating witnesses for this case are not partisans, which is why they cannot be waved away. In 2005 the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by the Democratic former president Jimmy Carter and the Republican former secretary of state James Baker, concluded flatly that absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud. A Democratic president put his name to that sentence. In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in 2008, Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court’s leading liberal, wrote for the majority that flagrant examples of voter fraud have been documented throughout the nation’s history, and he cited the East Chicago case to prove that the risk is real and can decide a close election. When the liberal lion of the Court concedes the point and footnotes a Democratic machine to do it, the fraud-is-a-myth line simply collapses. And in 1982 a Chicago federal grand jury, in a report a chief judge took the rare step of releasing publicly, called vote fraud a cancer that must be treated lest it destroy our constitutional rights, after a Department of Justice investigation estimated 100,000 fraudulent ballots and produced 63 convictions. That is ordinary citizens, not a think tank, rendering the diagnosis.

The Heritage Foundation has assembled the dry confirmation of all this, a database holding 1,567 proven instances of election fraud, each ending in a conviction, an overturned election, or an official finding of wrongdoing, and Heritage is candid that this is a sample, not a census, since it omits fraud caught but never charged and fraud never detected at all. The real figure is necessarily higher.

So return to where we began, to Los Angeles and the lead that died over five days of counting. I am not telling you a court has found fraud there, because it has not. I am telling you that the surface signature of that race, a Republican leading on election night and overtaken by late ballots from the unsupervised channel, is the identical signature that, in Philadelphia and East Chicago and Jim Wells County, turned out under judicial examination to be theft. A pattern does not convict. A pattern tells you where to look, and a serious people looks.

The moral stakes are not abstract. Every fraudulent ballot cancels a lawful one. The citizen who waited in line and marked an honest vote has had it quietly erased by a vote that should not exist, which makes fraud not a victimless procedural lapse but a direct disenfranchisement, the theft of the one possession every American holds in perfectly equal measure. The defenders of unsupervised mail voting are asking us to expand the precise channel in which the documented thefts have clustered for 160 years, and to do so on faith that this time the seam will hold. The historical record does not earn that faith. It earns the opposite, the demand that the instrument be made trustworthy before we trust it.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.