By Joe W. Bowers Jr. | California Black Media
The President of the United States appeared on national television and was asked a simple question: What evidence do you have that California’s election was rigged?
His answer: “All I have to do is look.”
Pressed for something more, he said he listens to people — unnamed, unspecified and unverifiable. Then he called the journalist “crooked” and “stupid” for asking.
That is the entirety of his case.
What makes the response particularly troubling is that Republicans routinely accept the same election procedures in states they control. Utah conducts its elections almost entirely by mail. Florida counts millions of mail ballots. Alaska, Montana, Wyoming and Kansas all allow votes to be counted after Election Day under certain circumstances. When Republicans win those states, there are no accusations of fraud and no demands for federal intervention.
Yet, when California counts legal ballots after Election Day, some critics who accept those rules elsewhere begin questioning them here.
The stakes are not small. A Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in Los Angeles announced election fraud investigations and dispatched a federal representative to observe ballot counting, despite the absence of publicly identified evidence of wrongdoing.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta responded that no specific allegation of voter fraud had been identified.
What is striking is that even many Republicans are not making Trump’s case. Steve Hilton, the Republican gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Trump, acknowledged that his campaign had found no evidence of wrongdoing.
“We’ve seen nothing,” Hilton told reporters.
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber offered a different perspective on the criticism surrounding the state’s vote count.
“Accuracy comes before speed,” Weber said, explaining that California must count millions of ballots while protecting voters’ rights and ensuring election integrity. California’s election laws are built around a simple idea: maximizing participation while making sure every eligible voter has an opportunity to be heard.
That matters because every audit, recount, court challenge and review conducted over recent election cycles has reached the same conclusion: widespread voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.
For Black Californians, attacks on the legitimacy of lawful ballots strike a familiar chord. Black Americans spent generations fighting poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and violence for the right to vote and have those votes counted. When elected officials question legal ballots without evidence, that history does not feel distant. It feels current.
The irony is that California’s election results unfolded exactly as election officials said they would.
Consider what the counting actually produced.
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Councilmember Nithya Raman, who had been polling ahead of Spencer Pratt before Election Day, found herself trailing Pratt — a former reality television personality running his first campaign for public office. On Election Night, Pratt was ahead by more than 40,000 votes. As legally cast mail ballots continued to arrive and be processed, she steadily erased that deficit and secured a place in the November runoff.
That outcome surprised some observers, but it should not have. Election officials process ballots roughly in the order they are received, and election data showed that large numbers of Democratic voters held onto their mail ballots and returned them in the final days before the election. The same pattern helped Karen Bass overcome an Election Night deficit against Rick Caruso in 2022.
The result also carries historic significance. Bass is the first Black woman elected mayor of Los Angeles. Raman now has an opportunity to potentially become the city’s first South Asian mayor. Whatever voters decide in November, the primary demonstrated that California’s election system worked as designed and produced a result that reflected the choices of the people who voted.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA-36) offered perhaps the simplest explanation. Election Night, he said, is like halftime in a football game. The score at halftime is not always the score at the end of the game. California’s election system counts votes until the count is complete, not until a television audience grows impatient.
In the governor’s race, Xavier Becerra trailed Steve Hilton on Election Night before moving into first place as additional ballots were counted. Election analysts have a name for this phenomenon: the “red mirage.” Early returns create the appearance of a Republican lead, only for later-counted mail ballots to reveal a different outcome.
California has seen the pattern repeatedly. What happened to Hilton in the governor’s race is what happened to Pratt in Los Angeles and Caruso in 2022. The red mirage faded as more legally cast ballots were counted.
The question is why some politicians embrace mail voting and extended counting periods when the results favor them, but question those same processes when the outcome changes.
For Black Americans, that debate carries particular weight. Generations fought for the right to cast a ballot and have it counted. The legitimacy of a vote does not change because the counting continues after Election Day or because the final result differs from the early returns.
If there is evidence of wrongdoing, it should be presented. If not, the public should have confidence in a process that counted every legal vote. In California, that is exactly what happened.
About the Author
Joe W. Bowers Jr. is a contributing editor to California Black Media and a graduate of Stanford University.