Trump, without evidence, says he ‘cheated’ California’s vote, federal investigation continues

To the surprise of few, President Trump also claimed without evidence that Democrats somehow cheated to win the California primary – posting on social media late Wednesday that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are investigating the matter.

“The Democrats have seen it again! They are trying to BECOME THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO REPUBLICANS. Here we are with the most recent numbers and many EMAILS IN THE VOICE,” said Trump on his social network Truth Social.

“There is massive fraud committed by Dumocrats in California. Polls are tied. It may not last for weeks. The US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles is investigating,” he wrote in a second post. “Why is the DELAY vote counted???”

A spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles – headed by Trump loyalist First Assistant US Atty. Bill Essayli – declined to comment Thursday morning about Trump’s requests for an investigation.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The office of Gov. Gavin Newsom responded directly to Trump late Wednesday in his social media post, writing, “Trump is lying about California again — time to hang up on grandpa and put him to bed.”

On Thursday morning, Newsom’s office wrote that there are “a lot of falsehoods circulating about the California election – including the President,” and recommended that people watch a CNN video about California’s election process. It concluded that delays in state vote counting were actually the result of state leaders deciding that giving voters “last-minute options” to vote was more important than a quick count.

“And yes, for the record: we wish the votes were counted sooner,” Newsom’s office wrote — a nod that the issue is not new.

In an email, Brandon Richards, Newsom’s deputy director for rapid response, said Trump’s claims are part of a “tinfoil hat level conspiracy theory that has been debunked time and time again.”

The president’s claims of fraud were predicted before the election by both election experts and Democratic leaders in California, who dismissed them early as a baseless pamphlet from a president plagued by low approval ratings.

Those same experts and Democratic leaders agree that California’s vote-counting process is taking too long and should be speeded up, but the pressure is not for nothing. Rather, it’s because California allows voters to vote by mail until election day — and then has to count those votes, which number in the millions and are subject to in-person signature verification.

Trump has long dismissed such explanations. Denying the election since he entered politics more than a decade ago, Trump has cast doubt on the election he and his party have lost many times since – especially when he said, and without evidence, that the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden was stolen.

Trump even challenged Biden’s victory in court, but his claims were completely rejected because neither he nor his lawyers could produce evidence to prove it.

He combined his strategy of targeting undocumented immigrants for political gain and his doubts about the integrity of the election by saying, and without evidence, that such immigrants somehow vote in large numbers, especially in big green states like California, despite experts saying there is no evidence of that.

He alleged that mail-in ballots — like those used by most California voters — are the richest source of voter fraud, despite the fact that the claim is unfounded and disputed by experts.

A consistent feature of his claims of election fraud is that they appear and target races only when Republicans are losing or losing ground.

Also, he tried to use his administration’s power to make drastic changes to election laws to restrict votes and require strict voter ID and proof of citizenship measures, despite the control of elections and their laws being constitutionally given to the states.

Those efforts have created a wave of litigation between the Trump administration and California and other blue states, with many cases pending in the courts regarding voter ID, proof of citizenship, voting by mail and the role the US Postal Service is allowed to play in processing those ballots.

Trump’s latest comments came as additional vote counting on Wednesday narrowed Republican Steve Hilton’s lead over his Democratic challenger in the California governor’s race and closed the gap in the LA mayoral race between MAGA-aligned candidate Spencer Pratt, currently in second place, and City Council Member Nithya Raman, who came in third.

The practice was expected. Election experts warned before the vote count began that there could be a “red tail,” where early voting among Republicans and late voting among Democrats – many of whom were unsure who they would vote for in the two high-profile races – would create the illusion of a Republican victory despite the majority of liberal votes still to be counted from large centers of the population.

It’s a trend that has resurfaced in previous elections, and one that doesn’t surprise careful election observers.

Election officials in California knew such claims would be made, as they have been in the past. Some local election officials have made it a point to prepare their staff for unfounded claims of electoral fraud ahead of this year’s primary election. State officials have made repeated efforts to explain the reasons why California’s election is taking so long, to play down claims amid claims that the delay was the result of fraud.

But those claims came regardless, not just from Trump.

Above Wednesday’s X suggesting that Pratt was losing power to Raman as more numbers came in, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote, “California keeps throwing votes. The odds are changing because the votes always seem to go one way. Count until you get the result you want?”

In addition to another X post Wednesday noting that the California recount will take time, Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official and married podcaster who is married to senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, wrote, “Democrats are about to steal the LA mayoral race and use mail-in voting.”

Both of the posts DeSantis and Miller were responding to were from Polymarket, a prediction market where people can bet on the outcomes of political races, pop culture events and a host of other subjects.

Such emerging financial markets, which process billions of dollars in bets, are fueling growing concerns about political meddling for profit — including campaign workers and other people with insider polling and other campaign information, or politicians and their staff, whose public comments about politics can sway those markets.