Since election night in California, a single theory of election fraud has taken root like no other — not just among online conspiracy theorists or bot accounts, but among major conservative influencers and people close to President Trump.

Late on election night, an update of vote counts in the Los Angeles mayor’s race appeared on election results pages of various media outlets including the Los Angeles Times.

It showed leading Democrats Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman receiving tens of thousands of new votes, and leading Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt receiving no new votes.

Close observers of the vote tally immediately took screenshots, with some shouting fraud. Others ran statistical analyses that showed it would be impossible for a candidate such as Pratt — running second in the race — to receive zero votes in such a large batch of ballots.

“They’re not even trying to hide the fraud anymore,” wrote Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one-time member of Trump’s inner circle.

The claim fit into the broader narrative being pushed relentlessly by Trump and other Republicans in recent days, that California Democrats were cheating.

But the discrepancy in the Tuesday vote count in the mayor’s race was not fraud.

What attracted far less attention than the update with zero Pratt votes was another update one minute later that showed tens of thousands of votes for Pratt, and none for Bass or Raman.

There was no batch of votes that included zero votes for any candidate, as Los Angeles County’s own data show plainly.

But voting data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass’ and Raman’s votes in the first and Pratt’s in the second.

“The AP vote count receives updates as provided by election officials and adds them to our vote count. What happened in this case is that there was a lag in an automated update such that some candidates’ votes were added in one update and the other candidates followed about a minute later,” the Associated Press said in a statement to The Times.

“Specifically, an electronic update from the Los Angeles County website pulled in votes for only one group of candidates, including Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. Exactly one minute later, the electronic update picked up the votes for another group of candidates including Spencer Pratt. Taken together, the updates included 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass and 9,521 votes for Raman, along with votes for other candidates.”

The Times’ election results page relies on the AP’s data feed, and checks for updates once a minute.

According to a Times review of election night results data, The Times pulled data from the AP’s feed at approximately 8:35 p.m. that included 0 new votes for Pratt and eight other candidates. When The Times’ system next checked for new numbers a minute later, there was an update with votes for Pratt but no new votes for Raman, Bass and others.

Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, said he could not speak for how news outlets report county data, but that he could confirm there were no batches of votes that included zero votes for Pratt.

“It is false,” he said of that narrative. “In every single result update that we released on election night and since election night, he has received votes,” Sanchez said.

Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who researches and evaluates claims of election fraud, conducted his own data analysis of the vote updates, and came to the same conclusion.

He said there was an initial update with no Pratt votes, but a second one 41 seconds later with no votes for Bass or Raman — leading him to believe the single batch of ballots was just reported in two back-to-back updates rather than one.

“Because they came so close together, it looks like it was just a sequence of updates,” he said.

Grimmer said news outlets are “thinking about speed” and the best way to get people the most accurate information as quickly as possible, but “haven’t quite adjusted to being in this world where there’s this group of people who monitor these data feeds as if they are official government reports.”

“It leads to these horrible tweets about there being evidence of fraud,” he said.

Grimmer said he operates under the “mantra” that such fraud claims can’t be dismissed “by mere assertion” that the fraud didn’t happen, but must be looked into — which is why he dived into the data in the first place. This claim, he said, was similar to claims about odd-seeming vote tallies that were made during and after the 2020 election of Joe Biden over Trump, so he was familiar with how to look into the data.

“You can just go to the source code for the page, and then you can find where the sort of feed is, and that’s all I did — just found the feed, downloaded it, and then just saw what the updates were,” he said.

Grimmer said it was not surprising to him that people were watching the data feeds come in closely enough to notice an apparent discrepancy in the data that lasted less than a minute.

“There is a group of individuals who are convinced that there’s lots of fraud going on in U.S. elections, and for whatever reason, this group is convinced that they’re gonna uncover this by careful monitoring of these data feeds and the data that is being reported,” he said.

Grimmer said he would not presume to tell news outlets how to do their job of delivering election results quickly in the future, but does hope they balance the need to move quickly with “this reality that their feeds are now being monitored by individuals who think that they’re able to discover instances of fraud from what’s happening in the feeds.”

Sanchez reiterated that the county’s own official results of votes have been accurate — saying that “at no point” did the county office “report an official results update in which Pratt received zero votes.”

Former reality star Spencer Pratt’s lead over Councilwoman Nithya Raman in the Los Angeles mayoral contest narrowed Thursday, while Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton maintained a lead over Democratic candidates Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer.

Following the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, California’s key elections have taken on national significance, serving as critical testing grounds for the future of progressive leadership.

Pratt, a registered Republican, remains behind incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass for a chance to advance to the November general election. Bass has already secured enough votes to advance.

With 163,549 votes in Los Angeles’ latest tabulation, Pratt maintains a near 6% lead on Raman, who has 130,473 votes, according to the Thursday vote count from Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and the County Clerk.

A Fox News Digital review of an archived version of Los Angeles’ official vote tally shows that Raman gained over 10,000 votes in the latest count compared to under 6,000 for Pratt. At the previous count, Pratt had 157,116 votes compared to Raman’s 119,809.

LA CITY COUNCILWOMAN PREVIOUSLY BACKED BY DSA RUNNING FOR MAYOR IN PRIMARY CHALLENGE TO BASS

CALIFORNIA ELECTION RESULTS STILL UNDECIDED AS LOS ANGELES BEGINS COUNTING BALLOTS

In the governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton maintained a slim lead over former Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. Hilton has 1,533,435 votes as of Friday afternoon, according to the California Secretary of State. Becerra is behind with 1,470,100 votes.

Billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer trails both with 1,139,517 votes. 

HILTON, BECERRA IN THE LEAD WITH VOTES STILL BEING COUNTED IN BATTLE FOR CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR

Like the mayoral race, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the votes in the gubernatorial race, the top two candidates will advance to a November runoff.

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While California’s polls closed on June 2, it could take weeks for results to be final. The state did not have its official final results from the 2024 election until state Secretary of State Shirley Weber certified the election results in December, 38 days later.

A bipartisan bill has since passed in 2025 requiring “non-problematic” votes to be counted within 13 days.

The state leads the nation in mail-in ballots, with 81% of voters sending their choices by post in 2024, nearly double the national average of 43% for 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The last time Angelenos sacked an incumbent city attorney in the primaries, almost 30% of them were unemployed.

That was May 2, 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression, when sprawling encampments blanketed downtown, King Kong ruled movie theaters and violent crime reached a fever pitch not seen again for almost half a century.

Incumbent City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto’s near-certain defeat on Tuesday may have little in common with Erwin P. Werner’s primary loss 93 years ago, but themes of Depression-era Los Angeles echo through the contest.

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice who leads the race with ballots still being counted, wooed voters with shoe-leather and social media savvy, promising to use the office to fight for wage workers and tenants. But it was the city’s powerful unions and its increasingly democratic socialist bloc that propelled her to the top spot, mirroring the coalition that drove California’s sharp left turn in the early 1930s.

Meanwhile, county prosecutor John McKinney tapped into voter frustration with homeless encampments, a blighted downtown and general distrust of City Hall to pull off a last-minute heist of the second runoff spot. McKinney only started campaigning in earnest five weeks ago, but managed to win votes with a tough-on-crime campaign — even as some categories of city crime have dipped to historic lows.

As of Thursday morning, Roy had nearly double the number of votes of Feldstein Soto. McKinney led the incumbent by 13 percentage points for the second runoff slot. The race has not yet been called, but Feldstein Soto issued a statement effectively conceding the race Wednesday morning. She acknowledged that “the voters had spoken” and referenced “her successor’s administration.”

Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The ouster of Feldstein Soto would be nearly unprecedented. Werner’s 1933 loss is the only similar instance since the city adopted its current primary ballot process in 1917, according to the City Clerk’s office. No other incumbent city council member or mayor has ever failed to advance out of the primary when facing two or more opponents.

“This is not something that has happened in the lifetimes of most people who follow city government,” said Mike Bonin, former City Council member and executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

McKinney’s sudden emergence in the race in May saw him hijack the incumbent’s support from law enforcement. His campaign received $3 million worth of independent expenditures. An official with a group supporting McKinney — who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media — said an internal poll showed Feldstein Soto falling nearly 10 points outside the runoff a week before election day.

Since Roy had already captured the support of the county Democratic Party and energized left-leaning voters, that put Feldstein Soto in the center, analysts said, which left her vulnerable in a race that most people casting ballots hadn’t closely followed.

“To the extent that people had any information, they knew that one of them basically wanted to be tougher and somebody on the other side wanted to be kinder, that left her with very little room to maneuver,” said Roy Behr, a longtime consultant to veteran politicians in the city.

Roy “micro-targeted” likely progressive voters in social media spots, experts said, presenting as an affable presence in her ever-present purple blazer while sharing her vision of serving as the “people’s lawyer.”

Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice, appears poised to finish first in the June 2 primary race for L.A. city attorney.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Boosted by a massive influx of cash from rental giant Airbnb, some of McKinney’s ads played up his hard-luck upbringing in one of New Jersey’s most violent cities. His campaign also sent out texts that painted his opponents as “George Gascón”-style Democrats, invoking the former progressive district attorney as a bogeyman for voters anxious about crime.

AI-generated videos depicted McKinney as a stoic, suit-clad crime fighter walking through a dystopian version of L.A.’s Metro system.

“The debate isn’t necessarily two candidates on one stage appealing to one person, it’s for attention and information in the same sphere,” said Spencer Slovic of Mycorrhiza Digital, who ran Roy’s digital advertising. “That battle of information will play out almost in different realms.”

Without a compelling story for her powerful but poorly understood role, Feldstein Soto often struggled to explain her achievements in office.

In a recent interview with The Times, she said she delivered on “public safety, public integrity and public services.” She went on to discuss granular improvements she made to the office, such as limiting access to law enforcement databases by former employees, modernizing internal systems and improving the rapport between the city attorney’s office and LAPD. By her own admission, she doesn’t often publicly celebrate her accomplishments.

“I didn’t hold some big press conference and hop up on a white horse and declare myself Joan of Arc and the savior of all things Los Angeles,” she said. “Which I could have done.”

Tumult during Feldstein Soto’s lone term in office was easier for voters to identify. The cost of litigation exploded. A high-ranking city lawyer accused her of abusing her power, prosecuting political enemies, mistreating employees and engaging in “inappropriate alcohol consumption.” Feldstein Soto claimed she improved her office’s rapport with the LAPD, but the police union’s decision to rescind its endorsement of her and instead back McKinney cost her a key voting bloc.

Feldstein Soto’s messaging was at times muddled and lacked the flair of her challengers, political observers said. Campaign finance records show she paid for 80 email blasts, mailers and other messages that sought to influence voters.

John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor, appears set to advance to a run-off against Marissa Roy in the race for L.A. city attorney.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

In one video, she stood in front of a static background and talked for three minutes straight about her record while describing her opponents as representing the “extreme left” and “extreme right.” She attacked both for receiving large sums of money from “special interests,” especially McKinney for accepting Airbnb’s largesse. Feldstein Soto sued the rental giant for price gouging in the wake of the 2025 wildfires.

Roy’s campaign sent out 180 communications, records show, the bulk of them ads for Instagram and Facebook, where her team said they saw instantly which stories resonated with likely voters and which were duds.

Slovic said a “clip of Hydee talking about how she wasn’t going to prosecute the Trump administration” seemed to touch a nerve with voters.

“That was by far our best performing ad,” he said, adding, “What Democrats really want in primaries is someone who will fight and have some sort of backbone.”

McKinney had just 23 communications, campaign records show, plus 19 more made by independent groups. He often leaned into the same gritty visuals that defined mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt’s viral AI spots.

In a race for a position most voters don’t understand, McKinney’s and Roy’s ability to play a consistent character may have proved critical, political analysts said.

“The vast majority of voters started off with no strong feelings about the race,” Behr said. “Nobody had any votes locked down other than their friends and neighbors.”