Nithya Raman leads Spencer Pratt in LA mayor’s race as vote-counting continues

Nithya Raman, the progressive Los Angeles city councillor, appeared to be edging out Spencer Pratt in the LA mayoral race challenging Karen Bass as Donald Trump continues to repeat falsehoods that California elections are “rigged”.

The pair have been battling for the number two spot to face off against the incumbent, who already secured enough votes to advance to a runoff in November. Pratt, a former reality TV star, held a lead over Raman for days, but as ballot processing from last week’s election continued, the city councillor has pulled ahead.

As of Sunday afternoon, Raman led by just over 3,000 votes with 196,198 votes to Pratt’s 193,085, according to the most recently available figures. There are just under 150,000 ballots left to be counted, according to an estimate from the Associated Press. Late ballots have favored Democrats as many blue voters only returned their ballots in the final days leading up to this year’s election.

With so many voters having hung on to their ballots and California’s notoriously slow processing time, the results of some of the biggest races in the state remain unclear. In the governor’s race, voters are waiting to learn whether Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Tom Steyer will advance to run against former Biden administration cabinet official Xavier Becerra. Becerra advanced to the general election on Friday.

But misinformation about the integrity of California’s election and conspiracy theories about vote rigging have proliferated while the state awaits results. On Friday, Trump walked out of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press after making false election claims, calling the state “crooked” and alleging there was “cheating”.

“It’s four days and they aren’t even close to counting [ballots],” Trump said.

Earlier in the week, the president had repeated the same accusations, declared victory for his favorite candidate in the governor’s race, Hilton, and promised an investigation.

The US justice department sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles, and Bill Essayli, the Trump-appointed first assistant US attorney for the central district of California, announced that his office, along with the FBI’s Los Angeles office, had “multiple election fraud investigations under way”.

Over the weekend, Pratt, who Trump endorsed, also appeared to allude to election conspiracy theories with a post on social media in which he said, with a winking emoji: “They’re not the only ones who know where to find votes.” In another post, he seemed to suggest that Raman’s lead in the race came from votes from the entirety of the city’s unhoused population.

By Monday morning he advised his followers: “Folks, we’re dealing with a fraction of a percentage point difference, there’s still hundreds of thousands of votes outstanding, and LA officials have given us the next 3 weeks to count! Let’s git-r-dun!”