President Donald Trump raised the possibility of cheating in the primary elections for mayor of Los Angeles and governor of California.
“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks,” he wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.
“Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???” Trump wrote.
The post was preceded by another Truth Social post in which Trump zeroed in on the mail-in ballots cast in the Tuesday elections.
“The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES,” Trump posted.
“Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he wrote.
The Tuesday elections showed that two Republican candidates ran strong in the Democrat-majority city and state.
Is Trump right about what is happening in California?
In the primary for governor, Republican Steve Hilton topped all candidates with 27.6 percent of the votes, as noted by NBC News, which called the race too close to call with 56 percent of the votes counted. Democrat Xavier Becerra was second with 25.6 percent.
In the primary for mayor of Los Angeles, where 62 percent of the vote has been counted, incumbent Democrat Karen Bass leads with 35 percent of the vote, according to NBC News. Republican Spencer Pratt is second with 29.9 percent, while Democrat Nithya Raman is third with 22.8 percent.
Ridiculous. Absolutely cheating https://t.co/xE4l1DykiS
— Benjamin Bricco (@bricks32) June 4, 2026
In each case, the top two finishers advance to the general election.
California’s long lag times to count votes were pilloried by pollster Nate Silver, who slammed the Golden State’s vote-counting procedures on Monday and said waiting weeks for an election result should not be tolerated in the United States.
The founder of the polling website FiveThirtyEight posted several messages to X late Monday night comparing California to a third-world nation for dragging out the electoral process.
“The fact that California elections often can’t be resolved for weeks is kind of insane and not common in other electoral systems around the world,” Silver wrote, later calling the incompetence an example of “learned helplessness.”
Silver wrote that it shouldn’t take “several weeks” to know who the victor is, adding that this kind of system “should be more stigmatized.”
After the Nov. 5, 2024, presidential election, California was still counting votes into December.
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