Since election night in California, a single theory of election fraud has taken root like no other among online conspiracy theorists, bot accounts, conservative influencers and people close to President Trump. It proved to be a simple misreading of the voting data.
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.
Some 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.
In fact, the update that showed zero Pratt votes was followed one minute later by another update 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 the claim fit into the broader, false narrative being pushed relentlessly by Trump and other Republicans in recent days, that California Democrats were cheating.
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