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MY VIEW -
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything," – Joseph Stalin
Trust the vote? Really? Los Angeles has reached a dangerous tipping point where the very mechanisms of living in a democratic republic are being called into question. To understand why millions of Angelenos and Californians view election results with deep-seated suspicion, you do not need to invent a complex conspiracy theory. The conspiracy, if one exists, is entirely secondary. The city's visible condition is now so degraded, so profoundly mismanaged, and so openly hostile to ordinary taxpayers that a more fundamental question has become unavoidable: How do these utter policy failures, masquerading as politicians Raman and Bass, keep getting re-elected?
How does Karen Bass, the Castro admirer and DSA queen, Nithya Raman, are about to win another election is being questioned across social media. As LA’s election count is slow-walked to its inevitable, undesirable outcome. The commentary online is often crude, angry, and legally unproven.
But these howls of protest are not coming from a vacuum. They are the political scream of residents who look at Los Angeles, and see the destruction of the Pacific Palisades, the staggering deficits, the entrenched sidewalk encampments, the acute police shortages, the infrastructure decay, the union giveaways, and the permanent NGO gravy train, and simply cannot reconcile their city's ruined condition with the continued political survival of the people who engineered the wreckage.
When election results take days or weeks to materialize, public confidence evaporates. In the current mayoral race, incumbent Karen Bass has secured her spot in the November runoff. Yet the second spot remains a battleground, with Democratic Socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman steadily erasing the early election-night lead held by outsider Spencer Pratt as tens of thousands of mail-in ballots continue to drop days after the polls closed.
Election officials insist this agonizingly slow sequence is entirely normal. Frustrated voters call it suspicious and statistically impossible. The reality is that both can be true at once. Late-counted ballots may be technically lawful under California's bogus rules, but they reek of manipulation and yield tallies so unbelievable that they fundamentally undermine belief in the democratic process and in the outcome reflecting the will of living, eligible, lawful voters.
The establishment wants us to believe that this charade of every vote counts without serious verification is the pinnacle of modern democracy. It is a lie. No other serious country or state operates under such asinine rules for counting votes, rules that seemingly make administrative uncertainty the default and fraud the only conclusion that satisfies common sense. Consider the global landscape: India, the world’s largest democracy with a population of over 1.4 billion, can successfully process, tabulate, and count 640 million votes in less than 24 hours.
Our neighbor, Mexico, handles its massive national elections with immediate, centralized, transparent tallies on election night through its federal institute. Yet, here in the self-proclaimed technological capital of the Western world, the county of Los Angeles requires weeks of bureaucratic foot-dragging to process a few hundred thousand pieces of paper. When third-world nations can deliver swift, transparent, indisputable results in a single day, California's prolonged 'counting' ritual ceases to look like meticulous validation. It looks like a deliberate strategy to achieve the desired outcome by manufacturing enough “false ballots” that the results cannot even be questioned. See Governor Greasy Hair’s break-glass strategy comments.
The suspicion is not driven solely by election law; it is driven by the sheer absurdity of the outcomes. A healthy political system produces accountability. Incompetence leads to removal; disaster leads to resignation; broken promises lead to defeat. Los Angeles has completely subverted that historic precedent. Here, failure becomes a budget request for more money, disaster becomes a stage-managed press conference, “homelessness” becomes a permanent funding stream, and the public safety collapse becomes another opportunity to defund the police.
Voters look at this tragedy and ask the obvious question: Who is voting for this? Who drives through the Valley, the Westside, Hollywood, Venice, Downtown, or the Palisades, looks at the sprawling RV settlements, open-air drug markets, shattered sidewalks, crumpling roads, rampant retail theft, and a permanent, untaxed NGO administrative class, and says, "Yes, give me more of this"? Who concludes that these incumbents deserve another term after a four-year test drive?
Because the political outcomes defy common sense, public focus has naturally shifted to the machinery of the vote itself. Critics point to a highly vulnerable mix of universal vote-by-mail ballots, ballot harvesting, weak voter identification, and 35 days of vote tabulation. The system is designed to offer opportunities for skullduggery rather than scrutiny. The big question is, how come late ballot drops never, ever, favor a Republican? Because they only favor Democrats, we are looking at a statistical impossibility.
The voter-roll issue has become a political powder keg. A major federal lawsuit alleges that California Secretary of State Shirley Weber has violated federal law by failing to purge more than 873,000 inactive registrations that should have been removed years ago. How many of these registrations have been turned into ballots and are being counted?
The Inactive Registration Problem (Federal Lawsuit Allegations):
- 873,092 total registrations inactive through at least 2 general federal elections.
- 326,808 registrations have been inactive for at least 3 general federal elections.
- 151,202 registrations have been inactive for at least 4 general federal elections.
- 33,922 registrations have been inactive through at least 5 general federal elections, with some dating back before 2016.
While a lawsuit is an accusation rather than final proof, these figures are politically radioactive. They expose the central, systemic vulnerability of California’s election model: cluttered, outdated voter rolls combined with universal mail-in ballots create an open invitation to doubt the official narrative.
The ultimate masterstroke of Sacramento's anti vote transparency was in the form of Senate Bill 73, an "emergency" measure designed to insulate the election machine from any meaningful outside scrutiny, which arrived just days before the June 2nd primary. This bill says the fix is clearly in, and it’s legal, and because it's the law, you can’t do anything about it.
SB-73’s most egregious assault on transparency is a blatant gag order on independent oversight, explicitly prohibiting vote-by-mail observers from challenging obviously non-matching or suspicious signatures on ballot envelopes once internal government workers have processed them. To ensure that this system of potential fraud remains entirely unchecked, SB 73 goes so far as to criminalize local election officials who would dare cooperate with law enforcement, making it an offense to permit independent inspections by police or sheriffs of voter rolls or voting machinery without a strict court order.
The era of condemning us by calling us election deniers is over. The federal government has officially entered the arena. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli recently announced that his office, in conjunction with the FBI, has launched multiple election-fraud investigations in California. While state officials have rejected the underlying fraud allegations and noted that routine walkthroughs of ballot processing centers have cited no immediate wrongdoing, the intervention is historic. Federal prosecutors are now publicly looking at California's election integrity and attempting to audit the state’s voter rolls. When federal law enforcement steps in, the goings on behind closed doors must be replaced by absolute transparency.
California’s election laws seem to be all about enabling fraud. Huntington Beach passed a voter ID law. The State sued to block it and then passed a law making local voter ID requirements illegal. When you legalize no ID and vote by mail, you enable cheating.
The establishment makes a fatal mistake when it treats public skepticism as another conspiracy theory or insurrection. The growing doubt is rationally connected to the lived experience of everyday Angelenos. People are watching their city collapse in real time, yet they are told to shut up while a slow-motion ritual enacts performative vote counting behind a veil of secrecy, which routinely returns the exact same politicians to power.
Given practically unlimited time, opportunity, and incentives, candidates who should have been too embarrassed to seek reelection have no fear of an embarrassing result. They are placed in office by a machine so corrupt that it defies reason to believe this election took place in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
In California, your voting rights don’t count if you're not a democrat!
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
