By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES, June 8 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday repeated claims that California's elections are rigged, disputing without evidence voter tallies showing the Republican candidate he endorsed in the Los Angeles mayor's race appeared headed for defeat.
Trump's attack on California's election system and what he called the excessive amount of time it takes the Democratic-controlled state to count votes was the latest twist in his long-running narrative of elections
being rigged against him and other Republicans.
In an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" that aired on Sunday, Trump stormed out of an interview after the host, Kristen Welker, challenged his unproven assertions that California election officials were cheating because after several days they "aren't even close" to finalizing the results.
On Monday, Trump questioned election returns showing Republican Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV star he backed in the Los Angeles mayor's race, falling into third place behind two Democrats - incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman - six days after polls closed.
"Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had," Trump wrote. "Rigged Elections!"
California officials have countered that the state's election system is subject to rigorous safeguards that include testing of voting equipment, strict controls on the chain of custody of ballots and verification of all signatures.
Trump also pointed to the California governor's race, where the Republican he endorsed for that election, TV commentator Steve Hilton, was trailing two Democrats in the primary - former cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra and billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer.
"Now they'll be working on great guy Steve Hilton," Trump wrote, seeming to suggest that Democrats were manipulating the primary vote count to exclude Hilton from the final contest.
Under California's "open primary" system, all candidates for elective office compete on a single primary ballot - rather than on separate ballots for Democrats and Republicans - and the top two vote-getters in the primary advance to a general runoff election in November.
Bass emerged as the clear frontrunner among the 14 mayoral candidates, commanding nearly 35% of the votes counted as of Monday. Raman, who started out in third place, edged past Pratt for the No. 2 spot on Sunday and remained ahead of him in second place on Monday with 27.12% of the votes tallied.
Pratt, still trailing at No. 3 with 26.69% of the vote, insisted on social media on Monday that he still had a chance to clinch a spot in the November runoff.
"Folks, we're dealing with a fraction of a percentage point difference," he wrote on X. "There's still hundreds of thousands of votes outstanding, and LA officials have given us the next three weeks to count!"
On Sunday, Pratt suggested that a "net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday" came from ballots cast by homeless people. Referring to a recent annual count of the city's unhoused population documenting more than 43,000 individuals experiencing homelessness on any given night in Los Angeles, Pratt wrote: "43,000, huh? Where have I seen that number before ...? Probably nothing."
'COUNTING VOTES FOR WEEKS'
The Republican Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, weighed in with comments of his own, doubting the integrity of California's elections.
"They are counting votes for weeks after the election," he said. Asked for evidence of rigged elections, Johnson replied, "Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove."
Republican criticism of California's election system builds on Trump's persistent repetition of false claims that his 2020 White House bid was stolen from him.
White House insiders and others familiar with the matter have said that harping on 2020 assertions of election fraud points to Trump's strategy of justifying new voting restrictions and energizing his base ahead of November elections that will determine control of Congress.
By casting the 2020 election as illegitimate, Trump is also laying the groundwork to challenge Republican losses and undermine Democrats if they win back power, multiple election experts have said.
California's prolonged ballot-counting process stems largely from a mail-in voting system designed to increase voter participation, which Trump has long said is prone to fraud.
The bulk of California votes in recent elections have been cast by mail, with ballots postmarked by election day accepted up to a week afterward, adding to the time it takes for them to be validated, processed and tabulated. States where voting is still conducted largely in person are thus able to finalize results more quickly.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
