This month’s primary election for Los Angeles mayor displayed a pattern tailor-made for conspiracy theories: A Republican candidate who looked in good shape on election night (in this case, for the second spot in November’s general election) wound up losing by the time most votes were counted.
What made this race so notable isn’t that the prevailing candidates flipped during vote counting. That happens all the time. Rather, it happened in slow motion, playing out not in hours, but over days:
Spencer Pratt, a Republican and former reality TV star, appeared in second place in the hours after polls closed June 2. Then as another 225,000 mail ballots were counted over the next five days, Nithya Raman, a progressive Democrat, pulled ahead for the second spot.
While this happens in lots of races — with leaders flipping in both directions — it often occurs so fast that the public barely has time to take note.
Election results shift as some counties report faster than others, some demographic groups vote earlier than others (and have their ballots counted earlier), or some states count in-person ballots ahead of mailed ones. Analysts who stare closely at incoming numbers on election night are used to this.
Over days, California stretches out patterns that other states report within hours of closing polls. As of this Tuesday, two weeks after Election Day, a small number of votes in Los Angeles were still trickling in as voters had a chance to correct errors like missing signatures on their mailed ballots. And this dynamic could feed fraud claims about much more than one mayoral race in November.
“The more elongated the process is, the more the public gets to see every twist and turn,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In slow motion, those twists and turns can appear stranger than they really are, he said.
Consider Michigan in the 2024 presidential election, a case where returns flipped in favor of Mr. Trump as votes were counted:
Democrats in the state were more likely to take advantage of absentee voting. When an initial batch of absentee votes was reported from suburban Detroit on election night, Kamala Harris briefly had a 50-point lead. But it didn’t take Michigan long to count most remaining votes, including those cast on Election Day that were more likely to favor Mr. Trump. All of this transpired in hours.
Or look at Virginia during the same election. Mr. Trump appeared ahead in the state for about two hours in the middle of the count, before the state’s populous urban counties pushed Ms. Harris back into the lead:
In California, a fairly predictable sequence of events played out this month as well.
The vast majority of California voters return their ballots by drop box or by mail. And ballots postmarked by Election Day can arrive up to a week later. Democrats in the state tend to vote by mail at higher rates, and this year Democratic mail ballots were expected to arrive particularly late as many voters waited and weighed their options in the turbulent governor’s race.
Within an hour of polls closing on election night, Los Angeles reported about 40 percent of its total votes for mayor, a mix of early-arriving mail and in-person Election Day ballots. Those votes skewed more Republican than the city as a whole. Then as officials counted the remaining mail ballots — slowly verifying signatures on them — the overall vote became more Democratic.
Younger voters also generally vote by mail closer to Election Day. That helps explain why later-counted mail ballots from Democratic voters broke more heavily for the progressive Ms. Raman over the incumbent Democratic mayor, Karen Bass.
If you know all that, “it would have been actually shocking if Pratt had gotten the most votes, or maybe even advanced to the runoff,” said Lisa Bryant, a professor of political science at California State University, Fresno. “That would have been fairly unexpected for the numbers in L.A.”
Across the country, the shape and direction of these shifts can vary by state and election cycle. After polls close in Florida, counties have 30 minutes to post the results of early and mail ballots they’ve already tabulated, often showing heavier Democratic support that recedes as Election Day results are reported. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee tends to release its absentee vote tally in the early hours of the next morning, driving a blue shift that can flip outcomes overnight.
It has long been the case that big cities, which have more ballots to count, report results slower than rural counties do. But other shifts have grown more pronounced with the growth of mail voting and with Mr. Trump sowing distrust of mail ballots among Republicans.
If Republicans and Democrats voted by mail at similar rates, it wouldn’t matter much what order those ballots were reported. But that hasn’t been the case since 2018:
States can adopt rules that speed up vote counting (California, by contrast, has made policy choices that slow things down). They can allow counties more time to open and pre-process mail ballots, or require that ballots arrive no later than Election Day.
Officials in Pennsylvania are not allowed to begin processing early-arriving ballots before Election Day. In 2020, a surge of voters, particularly Democrats, voted by mail during the pandemic. It took nearly three days of counting those mail ballots before Joe Biden overtook Mr. Trump on his way to ultimately winning the state. By 2024, Pennsylvania had acquired faster-counting equipment and required that most counties continued counting mail ballots without overnight breaks. You can see the difference here (with Mr. Trump being the evident winner on election night):
Mr. Trump’s fraud claims have raised the cost of dragging out these patterns (especially in the swing states that everyone pays attention to). In falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he has often cited later-counted votes that pushed Mr. Biden into the lead in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin, all after election night. And this November, control of the House of Representatives could come down to several California races that could take days to be decided.
All of this makes it increasingly important for states to design election systems that prioritize not just access and security, but also how the public perceives those things, political scientists said.
After all, Americans know plenty of stories of corrupt machine politics or suspicious presidential elections, said Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T.
“If you then want to build a political movement around that kind of skepticism about slow counts,” he said, as Mr. Trump has done, “then there’s fertile ground among the public.”
