It creates all manner of perverse incentives in the primary process.
I don’t have that much to add to our editorial and what Jeff and Jim have written about California’s shoddy, shady, perennially slow-moving vote-counting system. I believe we have an obligation to accept the results of elections unless and until we have hard evidence showing that they’ve been stolen, and a lot of people on the right have gotten way ahead of themselves on that front with Spencer Pratt’s loss. But I blame nobody for being suspicious of what happened, because the system is designed to do the opposite of instill confidence in its integrity, and Democrats getting the precise results they needed, long into the counting (specifically, votes for Raman; a vote for Bass would have done nothing to obstruct Pratt’s path to the general election), in a system with no real defenses against counting votes cast after Election Day — of course, people are very rightly going to be suspicious. And I don’t buy the argument that we should be unconcerned simply because Karen Bass would prefer to face Pratt rather than Raman; Bass doesn’t run the elections, and for the broader constellation of Democrats and left-leaning people and groups with stakes in how Los Angeles is run, Bass and Raman are two heads of the same hydra; some personnel would change if Raman wins, but the city will run the same, or possibly worse. Pratt may not have been a threat to genuinely reform Los Angeles (he’s never run anything in government before), and of course he was always a long shot to win, but he’d have had a lot more incentive to shake things up if he got power. Now, if he’s to have any chance of running the city, he’ll have to do what Rudy Giuliani did after 1989: keep building his case for four more years and run again when a Democrat is in the White House.
All of this is one further reason why our system will benefit if the Supreme Court decides Watson v. Republican National Committee to put an end (at least in federal elections) to states allowing votes to arrive after the election.
Frustration over Pratt’s loss is so acute for another reason I’ve been writing about for years, but that is worth reiterating: The jungle primary system is terrible, and California Democrats won’t get rid of it unless and until it costs them a major election. As the system currently exists, all the candidates from both parties run in a single primary, and the top two finishers regardless of party advance to November. This frequently locks Republicans out of fall elections in California, depriving millions of voters of any sort of choice, on the basis of primary elections that don’t draw as wide a turnout as a normal November election. It creates all manner of perverse incentives in the primary process. And it removes even the last remaining levers of control that parties have over who carries their banner. This is un-American. Sure, Los Angelenos were never all that likely to decide that their government needs real change badly enough to take a flier on Pratt, no matter how clever his campaign ads were. But they at least deserved a full campaign in which to have that case presented.