Election deniers falsely claim fraudulent 'ballot drop' in LA mayoral race

"Red flag... 39.3% vote in… Karen Bass had 117,579. Spencer Pratt had 86,323. 42.4% vote in… Karen Bass 130,429. Spencer Pratt 86,323," said a June 2, 2026 post on X sharing two screenshots of the race's live results. "Virtually every candidate received votes except for Spencer Pratt. Impossible."

The post came from "@MJTruthUltra," an account that has promoted the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory and other disinformation, including about elections. The account later claimed to have "caught them cheating in the California Mayor race" and sought to tie the state's contests to early message board posts from the anonymous persona behind QAnon.

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Screenshot from X taken June 8, 2026

The @MJTruthUltra post quickly spilled across X, amplified by prominent conservative influencers such as Lara Logan and Rogan O'Handley. Similar posts echoing its claims spread widely across the platform, promoted by billionaire owner Elon Musk and Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna.

The claims build on distrust sowed by President Donald Trump, who posted on Truth Social that Democrats were trying to "steal" the Los Angeles mayor seat from Pratt, a former reality TV star.

Bass, the mayor in the majority Democratic city, was projected alongside progressive candidate Nithya Raman to advance out of the June 2 primary election to a run-off in November, with Raman edging past Pratt as the ballot count continued June 9.

But the conspiratorial narrative that a large batch of ballots fraudulently boosted the Democratic candidates without logging any votes for Pratt is "disinformation," California Governor Gavin Newsom's office said on X (archived here).

The Los Angeles County Registrar's office called it "false and misleading information" (archived here).

"Spencer Pratt received votes in every official election results update reported by Los Angeles County," said Michael Sanchez, a spokesman for the registrar's office, in a June 8 email to AFP. He said that "at no point" did the office "report an official results update in which Pratt received zero votes."

Bill Essayli, a Trump-appointed first assistant US attorney who on June 5 said he "had multiple election fraud investigations underway," also rejected the allegations.

"There was a claim circulating on social media about an election night ballot update at the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters where one candidate received zero votes," Essayli wrote in a post on X (archived here). "We reviewed official county records. The claim is false. Each candidate received votes in every update."

AFP has debunked similar falsehoods during previous elections about supposedly nefarious influxes of ballots said to benefit other Democratic candidates.

Lagging media updates

The screenshots from @MJTruthUltra driving the "ballot drop" conspiracy theories did not come from the Los Angeles Registrar's official results page (archived here).

Instead, they captured numbers briefly displayed on the Los Angeles Times website, a spokesperson for the newspaper confirmed to AFP (archived here and here).

Like many US media outlets, the Los Angeles Times receives results from the Associated Press, which collects information from election officials and aggregates it (archived here).

Patrick Maks, director of media relations and corporate communications for the Associated Press, told AFP that "what happened in this case is that there was a lag in an automated update such that some candidates' votes were added in one update and the other candidates followed about a minute later."

"Specifically, an electronic update from the Los Angeles County website pulled in votes for only one group of candidates, including Karen Bass and Nithya Raman," Maks explained in a June 8 email. "Exactly one minute later, the electronic update picked up the votes for another group of candidates including Spencer Pratt. Taken together, the updates included 21,870 votes for Pratt, 12,850 votes for Bass and 9,521 votes for Raman, along with votes for other candidates."

In a June 5 report debunking the "ballot drop" claims, the Los Angeles Times reiterated that "voting data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass' and Raman's votes in the first and Pratt's in the second" (archived here).

The sequence of events is borne out in the source code for the New York Times's election results page, which also relies on the Associated Press (archived here).

The code, reviewed by AFP, showed Pratt stalling at 86,323 votes while Bass's count jumped from 117,579 to 130,429 (archived here). But about 41 seconds later, the numbers updated again, bumping Pratt's total up to 108,193 and keeping Bass at 130,429.

Justin Grimmer, a professor of public policy at Stanford University, wrote in a June 5 thread on X that this "isn't evidence of fraud" and instead shows "the data feed just did a candidate-by-candidate update in two closely published updates" (archived here).

"A common misconception is that data updates from media outlets, like the NY Times, reflect official updates from government sources," Grimmer said. "They don't, it is just the media collecting information they have from various sources and reporting those."

Sanchez, from the Los Angeles County Registrar's office, told AFP that he "cannot speculate on how third-party organizations ingest, process, display or update election data within their own platforms." But he said the registrar's "official results accurately reflected the votes counted."

Screenshots captured from the registrar's results page by a self-described Los Angeles watchdog on X, as well as various online data sources that scraped from the website, show votes for Pratt in every batch of ballots reported (archived here, here and here).

Read more AFP fact-checks about US politics here.