The Entirely Predictable LA Vote Count

After the primary election for mayor in Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt held a strong position in 2nd place.  Should that hold, he would face incumbent Mayor Bass in the general election.  Of course, only 63% of the ballots had been counted.  Here were the preliminary results:

Today, June 7, with 83% of the ballots counted, Nithya Raman has overtaken Pratt and is now the likely challenger in the general election. Here is where it stands:

That 20% batch of votes skewed alarmingly toward Raman.  Between the two charts, the three candidates accumulated an additional 205,437 votes.  How did each candidate do within this recent batch?

That's quite a swing.  Raman had been running at 64% of the votes that Mayor Bass was receiving.  However, over these last 200,000 votes, she has outpaced Bass by 9%.  How peculiar.

That Pratt's portion of the mail-in ballots dropped to 20% was unsurprising, but that the division between the two Democrats would shift so drastically is curious.  What would it look like if the split between Bass and Raman had continued?  Leaving Pratt with his 42K new votes and just splitting the remaining 163K between Bass and Raman by the same split as the first chart, we get the following:

Raman would have closed the gap by 22K, but not have surpassed Pratt.  She would still be in third place.  It would have been something like this:

When one considers how California outlawed voter ID (Senate Bill 1174) in 2024, let's say I am not confident in the results of this count.  That, in the wake of the Palisades Fire, the citizens of Los Angeles think that it is best to stay the course is hard to swallow.

Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.

Joseph Stalin