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

Death Valley Days: California's Paul Revere

It is September 1846 and the US garrison at Los Angeles is under siege by Californios.  Lt. Archibald Gilespie is in command of no more than 50 men.  Fort Moore has no water supply and his ammunition is limited.  He needs reinforcements to avoid defeat.  John Brown, locally known as Juan Flaco (Spanish for Lean John), volunteers to ride to Monterey to inform Commodore Stockton of the siege.  He rides through the Californio lines and is off to the Cahuenga Pass.  After a series of fictional challenges, he arrives in Monterey only to discover that Stockton has sailed on to San Francisco.  On a fresh horse, he finally delivers the news of the siege, six days after he had left.  Stockton orders the USS Savannah to assist Gilespie.

Though Death Valley Days proposes that Juan Flaco saved California by his impressive Paul Revere-like ride, the truth is that it hardly mattered.  Gilespie had brought the revolt on himself by imposing martial law on a city of 3,000 when he had such a tiny command.  The day Juan Flaco delivered his message, Gilespie surrendered the fort and retreated to San Pedro.  The Californios now held Los Angeles.  It was not until the California Battalion under Fremont, sailors and marines under Stockton, and dragoons under General Kearny combined forces in January of 1847 that Los Angeles was retaken.  John Brown's ride was a marvel in its time but failed to save Gilespie from surrendering to the Californios, the entire point of his ride.

Meh.