Supporters of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt were left devastated by a dramatic surge in votes for socialist candidate Nithya Raman — upending what appeared to be the former reality TV star’s clear path to the November runoff.
A flood of late-counted ballots has turned the race on its head, shrinking Pratt’s lead day after day and suddenly putting a Bass-Raman runoff in sight.
The stunning shift left many voters scrambling to understand what happened.
When The California Post told Pratt supporter Kenyatta Cole that Raman was rapidly closing in on Pratt’s runoff spot, he was initially at a loss for words.
“No way,” Pratt supporter Kenyatta Cole said of Raman’s surge. “I’m in shock. There’s just no way”
Cole, whose family spent three generations working in the city’s now-defunct As-Needed Haul Truck Program, expressed frustration by the latest numbers and the pace of vote counting in Los Angeles.
“Something has to change,” he said. “These ballots getting mailed out to everybody, that has to stop.”
Nico Ruderman, a former state senate candidate and member Venice Neighborhood Council, said many voters are struggling to reconcile the latest results with what they saw on election night Tuesday.
“It’s like being teased with hope and then having it ripped away,” he told The Post.
Ruderman said the prolonged count is creating anxiety, regardless of who ultimately advances.
“People need to believe in their elections. The perception of integrity is just as important as the integrity itself,” he continued.
“An election should be a time that brings people together. The slow count creates mistrust. It creates more division at a time when this country is really struggling to be one.”
Pratt supporter Sue Pascoe, founder of the local news site Circling the News and a Palisades fire survivor, said many residents had hoped the election would lead to results after almost a year and a half of frustration with City Hall.
“Sixteen or 17 months after the fire, nothing has changed,” she told The Post. “People still don’t have the money to rebuild. The permitting system is broken. Streets aren’t repaired.”
Pascoe said the size of Raman’s gains in recent ballot drops has left many voters with questions.
“To have that much of a shift in one vote drop just doesn’t seem logical,” she said. “If they could tell us where those ballots came from, I could understand it. But when the voting pattern suddenly changes and no explanation is given, it seems suspicious to a lot of us.”
The latest ballot update on Saturday delivered the biggest boost for Raman yet, cutting Pratt’s lead to roughly 1% with thousands of ballots still to be counted.
Pratt’s lead shrunk to just 7,494 votes, down from more than 20,000 votes a day earlier.
Raman picked up 23,514 votes in the latest count, more than double Pratt’s gain of 10,336.
At 10:15 p.m. on election night, with roughly 48% of ballots counted, Bass led with 36.65% of the vote. Pratt appeared firmly headed for a runoff spot with 29.55%, while Raman trailed at just 20.79%, according to the Associated Press.
Longtime political strategist Rick Taylor said the state’s slow ballot-counting process has exposed flaws in California’s voting system and sparked questions about whether reforms are needed.
He also warned that prolonged vote counts are undermining public trust in elections.
“The whole idea of mail-in ballots was to increase voter participation and make voting easier,” Taylor told The Post. “The question now is whether we’re getting enough of a turnout increase to justify a process that takes days or even weeks to finish.”
“At some point, you start eroding public trust when people are still waiting for outcomes days after an election,” Taylor said. “When vote counts drag on this long, voters begin to wonder what’s going on.”
As of Saturday, approximately 71% of ballots had been counted. Election officials are expected to continue releasing updated results daily as the remaining ballots are processed.