Dive into the controversy surrounding the Los Angeles mayoral election with Malcolm and Simone Collins on Based Camp. Spencer Pratt appeared to be on track for a runoff spot but was suddenly overtaken by a third Democratic candidate amid massive late mail-in ballot surges. Was this organic voting patterns, or something more suspicious?

The Collinses review claims of election irregularities, including the puzzling vote count updates that showed zero votes for Pratt in one batch, Skid Row vote harvesting (with residents allegedly paid in cigarettes and cash), ballot collection practices, and the broader issues of mail-in voting in deep-blue LA. They explore both the mainstream counter-narratives and on-the-ground reports while discussing voter ID, election integrity, and why local races matter.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing the latest LA election and the shenanigans that- that may or may not have occurred around that.

Shenanigans.

A couple of our fans were like, “This is the most blatant cheating I have ever seen in an American election,” and they wanted us to look into it.

And I will say that this is an interesting thing for me to look into, because I really don’t know... Like, obviously, if there was election fraud that happened The New York Times, NPR, all the major leftist sources are not going to admit it, because they didn’t want Pratt to win, right?

Simone Collins: Well, and what I did hear from my broad leftist news sources was

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: you gotta go, buddy.

What I heard from my broad leftist news sources was something along the lines of the Republicans are butt-hurting because Pen- Spencer Pratt didn’t even come close to winning, but he never would because he’s a Republican running in LA, and that seems totally reasonable, so I didn’t think to look further.

How can this be a [00:01:00] thing? I, I don’t understand why there could be any weirdness-

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then the, the secondary thing is obviously, and I, I, you know, I hate to say this about our side, but our side, like if he if, if there was actual election fraud, they would all be saying that regardless. So we don’t actually gain any new information from what they say there.

But we don’t gain a lot of new information from our side because obviously no matter what happened, if he legitimately lost at the last second our side would of course come out and say there’s election fraud, right? So that doesn’t exactly give me additional information

so what we’re going to do is we are going to review from both sides pieces on this particular alleged fraud.

And

Simone Collins: then we’re going to- Wait, so the fraud ‘cause you had told me earlier that you thought that the issue was... I mean, it’s inevitable that a Democrat’s gonna win in Los Angeles.

Malcolm Collins: No. It’s not so it’s kind of fraud. So there was a, a two-tiered runoff, okay? Okay. This is the gist of it, right? So there’s this runoff system, it’s called, like, a jungle primary where they decide who’s gonna run, and it means- Okay

you can have multiple Dems running against each other- Sure ... or a Dem versus a [00:02:00] Republican. Yeah. The leading candidate was this terrible Dem candidate. The, the Black woman, whatever her name is. Anyway she, she was coming in first. Then Pratt was coming in, and then there was a third Democrat that had about half the votes that Pratt had- Okay

in terms of sentiment polling, in terms of what they were able to measure, in terms of, like, at the ballots, bold, voter exit polling. And then at the very last moment, all of a sudden this flips. Mm. And all of a sudden- Mm ... Pratt’s getting no more votes- Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh ... and all the votes are going to the third candidate.

This is something that the, the narrative of I have laid it out is the narrative that even the left disagree with. Everyone agrees Pratt was demonstrably in the lead i- in terms of spot number two. And then now was he ever gonna win the full election? I, probably not. But the having him i- be in the final runoff was scaring people, right?

So Pratt was demonstrably in [00:03:00] the lead, then all of a sudden this socialist candidate flips it up, right? And-

Simone Collins: Doesn’t it have to do more with the fact that mail-in voting was very heavy in the Los Angeles election, that ballots could be posted quite late, and that it could be that this particular third candidate had a really heavy and also late mail-in voting campaign push?

Malcolm Collins: Well, that is the only plausible thing, except from at least my reading of this, they didn’t have a heavy and late mail-in voting push. So the explanation that leftists have been using

Okay. The explanation that leftists have been using for this is that, okay, yes, she didn’t have a coordinated mail in voting campaign that could explain this, but mail in voters are overwhelmingly Democratic in nature, right?

And so if the mail in voters are overwhelmingly Democratic in nature-

I don’t even remember what I was saying.

Simone Collins: So I had asked you it, [00:04:00] my, what I had heard was, oh, the Republicans are butt hurting about Spencer Pratt being in a minority lead for a little bit and then losing a bunch of ground all of a sudden seemingly. But what they’re missing is that Republicans are heavy with in-person voting, Democrats are heavy with mail-in voting, and in Los Angeles and in California in general I think even postmarked- Ooh

maybe even possibly up to the day of the election you can still submit mail-in ballots, and that what is happening is that possibly this third candidate or Democrats in general were just doing their last minute thing and sending in their mail-in ballots- Yes ...

Malcolm Collins: and that’s what was

Simone Collins: happening.

Malcolm Collins: So we will explore this theory, but there’s- Okay

a problem with it.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: The problem goes that in this last minute push that happened all of a sudden for this Democratic candidate, the votes should have, right, like if it had been like a normal election, should have continued to go disproportionately to the Democrat who looked like they were going to win the first place, right?

The voting [00:05:00] shouldn’t have shifted between Democratic candidates late in the process like this. That doesn’t make mathematical or narrative sense. So we’re going to get it- Because, yeah, it could just be that a bunch of Dem votes came in at the last minute, right? But then those votes would presumably proportionally still be for the person who won top ticket first, and then for the person who ended up beating out Pratt second, not almost all exclusively for the person who edged out Pratt.

So we’re gonna look into both of these explanations because there are, you know, plausibles and then it’s like, okay, yeah, but what’s really happening here?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, my, my standing plausible theory is that whatever that third candidate that got a surge after, you know, the, the, then overtook Spencer Pratt was just one who heavily focused on last minute mail-in ballot-

Malcolm Collins: Yeah

voting. So we’re gonna see if that’s true, and we’re also going to go into what the leftist counter-narrative is. So I’m gonna start with the leftist counter-narrative, okay? The leftist counter-narrative goes like this. And [00:06:00] I’ll be reading from a piece, How a Misreading of Data Fueled False Claims About LA Mayoral Vote Count.

Okay?

Late on election night, an update of vote counts in Los Angeles mayor’s election appeared on electoral results pages of various media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times. It showed leading Democrats Mayor Karen Bass and Council Member Neda Rahman receiving tens of thousands of new votes, and leading Republican former reality TV star Pen- Spencer Pratt from receiving no new votes.

So basically, on the screen, there was this big, like, huge number of votes to these two Democrats, and then literally zero votes for Spencer Pratt. Some voter, observers of the vote tally immediately took the screenshots with some shouting fraud. I mean, that looks a lot like fraud. Others ran statistical analysis 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 bal- ballots.

In fact, the update that showed zero Pratt votes was [00:07:00] followed one minute later by another update that showed tens of thousands of votes for Pratt and none for Bass or Rahman. There was no batch of votes that included zero votes for any candidate, and LA County’s own data shows that plainly. But the claim’s fit was the broader false narrative being pushed relentlessly by Trump and other Republicans in recent days that California Democrats were cheating.

Voter data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass and Rahman’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 some log in an automated update, such as that one candidate’s votes were added in an update, and the other candidates were followed about a minute later, the Associated Press told The Times.

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