The LA mayor election has become a flashpoint for unsubstantiated fraud claims, with Elon Musk joining President Donald Trump early Monday in questioning the results as progressive Democrat Nithya Raman pulled ahead of Republican Spencer Pratt. Her rise puts her on track to challenge incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in a November runoff.

Where the Vote Count Stands

The numbers tell the story of a slow but steady shift. According to the Associated Press, with roughly 83 percent of ballots counted in the mayoral primary, Raman had secured 27.1 percent of the vote, edging just past Pratt’s 26.7 percent.

The AP has already called a runoff spot for Bass. The open question has been who joins her, and the late returns increasingly point to Raman.

Pratt, a former reality TV star, ran a campaign modeled closely on Trump’s style and fueled by frustration over how Bass handled last year’s wildfires. He led Raman when the first batch of results dropped last Tuesday night. But mail-in and late ballots leaned heavily Democratic, allowing Raman to chip away at his lead and overtake him on Sunday. In a city as solidly blue as Los Angeles, that late-breaking pattern is unsurprising.

What Musk Posted About the Election

Musk, a billionaire and major GOP donor, spent Sunday amplifying a string of posts that cast doubt on the results and suggested, without evidence, that Democrats had engaged in fraud.

He started by resharing a post from venture capitalist Shaun Maguire that framed confidence in California’s election security as the real conspiracy theory. From there, Musk boosted several claims, including:

• That Raman’s performance amounted to a “statistical impossibility,” despite Los Angeles being a heavily Democratic city
• A reshared question posed to the Grok AI suggesting Pratt had received zero votes during an overnight tally of 24,000 ballots

That second claim had already been flagged with a community note citing a Department of Justice statement that disproved it. Musk also floated the idea that interviewing a thousand homeless residents in the Skid Row neighborhood about how they voted would be a “worthwhile exercise.”

What Trump Has Said

Musk’s posts echoed claims Trump made the previous week, when the president alleged that Democrats were trying to “steal” the California primaries from two Republican candidates: Pratt and gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton.

Offering no supporting evidence, Trump took aim at the large volume of mail-in ballots arriving late in the count, returning to a familiar theme. He has long opposed voting by mail and previously spread false claims about the 2020 election. He also asserted that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles was examining the voting process.

On Sunday night, Trump renewed his attacks on Truth Social, warning that two Republican candidates were being “cheated.” Early Monday, as some outlets called the mayoral race for Raman, he posted again, declaring there was “no way this could have happened” and calling it a “Rigged Election.”

The Pushback

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office wasn’t subtle in its response. Reacting to Trump’s overnight post on X, the press office dismissed him as the country’s biggest “sore loser” and told him to head “back to bed.”

The broader picture is straightforward: in a city where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, late and mail-in ballots breaking for a progressive candidate reflects well-documented voting patterns rather than evidence of wrongdoing. As the final tallies come in, Raman appears positioned to set up a Democratic-versus-Democratic runoff against Bass in November.