Even ‘Trust the Election’ Pundits Are Suspicious
California’s rigged elections are difficult to defend.
J.B. Shurk | June 10, 2026
California Democrats have rigged another election, and outsider Spencer Pratt has been bumped from the Los Angeles mayoral race. On Election Day, Pratt’s lead over third-place Nithya Raman was so large that she publicly cried over her loss. After a week of mail-in-ballot shenanigans, Raman has surged to secure a coveted spot on the November ballot — a statistical improbability in any jurisdiction familiar with arithmetic and basic ethics.
This “come from behind victory” has made it difficult for the usual election-fraud-deniers to pretend that California’s elections are free, fair, legal, or remotely based in reality. I noticed that National Review writer Dan McLaughlin — who spent a lot of time after 2020’s stolen election defending Joe Biden’s “victory” — felt compelled to make this small concession: “I’m suspicious of the voting in LA. For now, in the absence of evidence, that’s just vague suspicion unsupported by proof, but the vote-counting process reeks.”
I wrote a number of essays describing the historic irregularities of the 2020 election after Joe Biden supposedly “won” more than fifteen million extra votes than Barack Obama had secured in his re-election victory. In the 2020 election, President Trump won almost every traditional bellwether county across the country by double-digits. He expanded his voter support in almost every demographic and did better with black voters than any Republican since Eisenhower. He exceeded expectations in swing states. Economic variables and historic precedent strongly forecast a Trump victory. It was entirely reasonable to look at the statistical improbabilities of the 2020 election outcome (another race that was “decided” more than four days after Election “Day”) and conclude that the numbers did not make sense. It was entirely appropriate for Americans to gather outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and demand that Congress refrain from certifying an election irreparably tainted by mail-in-ballot fraud. Nevertheless, McLaughlin took time to mock me (and many others) and suggest that I had never heard of “split-ticket” voting. McLaughlin-type pundits have a difficult time understanding anybody who doesn’t blithely repeat back talking points mass-distributed by the corporate “news” machine.
It strikes me as ridiculous that McLaughlin finds it necessary to couch his “suspicions” about California’s elections behind verbal acknowledgments that, absent “evidence” and “proof” of fraud, no clear conclusions can be drawn. If you arrive home to find your front door smashed open, your house ransacked, and all your valuables missing, it is not a “vague suspicion” to conclude that your home has been burgled. I get the sense that McLaughlin would tell police, “In the absence of evidence, any conclusion that I’m the victim of burglary is just vague suspicion unsupported by proof.” I think this is why common-sense Americans have no interest in listening to pundits these days; doing so requires a level of pretending that makes most people feel dirty.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/even_trust_the_election_pundits_are_suspicious.html
