MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The LA mayor's ballot in the fall is set between two Democrats. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman will face incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. That, according to The Associated Press.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The results are coming in almost a week after Election Day in California. President Trump claims taking that long to call races is evidence of fraud. He stormed out of an NBC interview over the weekend when host Kristen Welker pushed back. Local election officials say they are doing their best in a state that prioritizes making it easy to cast a ballot.
MARTIN: NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks is here to talk us through a situation that could be a preview of November's midterms. Good morning, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hi, Michel.
MARTIN: So as we just said, President Trump says there is fraud. He didn't present any evidence of that. So let me just ask - why is it taking so long to count in California?
PARKS: So there are a couple reasons, but the biggest one comes back to the timing of when voters return their vote-by-mail ballots. It takes a bit more time for officials to process vote-by-mail ballots compared to in-person votes. They have to deal with scanning barcodes, removing the ballots from envelopes, getting them ready to check the signatures, for instance, to verify identity. That is the case everywhere, all over the country. But in California, we see this rush of voters - roughly a quarter of the electorate - that return their mail ballots on Election Day. So all that work can't even begin until after voting's completed. California election expert Kim Alexander coined that sort of logjam the pig-in-the-python effect because it takes a while to work through all those votes.
MARTIN: So that seems pretty straightforward. But President Trump's response plays into one of his preferred narratives, which is that elections where he doesn't get what he wants are stolen.
PARKS: Yes. And part of that is because we saw a similar dynamic play out in this LA mayor's race as what happened to Trump in 2020, where Trump's preferred candidate looked like he was going to advance to the general election as the first votes were counted but then ended up falling behind as more mail ballots were counted. Trump posted about this a lot, and we saw a number of other Republicans and influencers jump in as well - Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis. Here's Speaker of the House Mike Johnson talking to CNN's Manu Raju.
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MIKE JOHNSON: Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.
PARKS: Even for Republicans who have not gone full bore into Trump's stolen-election narratives, they've been bashing California. It's just a pretty low-risk way to score political points.
MARTIN: What are you taking away from all this as you look ahead to the midterms?
PARKS: I mean, every single election expert I talk to expects Trump to follow this exact same playbook in November if he does not like the way results are coming in. You can sort of imagine a scenario where control of the U.S. House rests on a few competitive districts in California, we're waiting on those results for up to a week, just like we are right now - that could be a potentially dangerous time. I was talking to Tammy Patrick, though. She's the chief programs officer for the National Association of Election Officials, and she said voters should look at this another way - as extra motivation to tune out the noise and just show up.
TAMMY PATRICK: If this meant nothing, no one would be doing all the things they're doing to try and make it more difficult. It would be ignored. But it's not being ignored.
PARKS: Every election will leave some people sad at the result, Patrick said. But the U.S. needs to get back to a place where that doesn't automatically mean questioning the election's legitimacy.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Miles Parks. Miles, thank you.
PARKS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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