If you’ve been keeping up on the California primary election vote counting that has been ongoing for over a week now, no doubt your eyebrows have been raised over the shifting results that are strange at best and incredibly suspicious at worst. And yet, despite the statistical impossibility of some of the numbers that we saw coming out of California, the leftist media still tells us to place all our faith in the legitimacy of their elections. Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow attempted just that at the top of Monday night’s episode of The Last Word on MS NOW, where they claimed that the election in Los Angeles “literally could not be more transparent,” just because the room officials were counting ballots in just happened to have glass walls:
I have to say, it was so great to see Jacob Soboroff tonight where they are counting votes in Los Angeles. And there's so many fascinating points about what he was showing us, including the glass walls. All the walls are glass. It couldn't—It literally could not be more transparent.
Calling an election transparent just because the counting happens behind glass walls is a huge leap of logic, even for O’Donnell. It’s like calling O’Donnell a triangle because he is also obtuse.
But, putting aside O’Donnell’s shaky logic capabilities, anyone with common sense and a passing familiarity with statistics would take the Los Angeles mayoral primary election with at least several million grains of salt. For days after polls closed, the result appeared to be a run-off between the Democrat incumbent mayor Karen Bass and Independent Spencer Pratt, but was instead called for Democrat Nithya Raman as soon as she noodled her way into second place. Raman flopped on election day, even giving a concession speech crying as if she’d just ingested a packet of Buldak sauce, but then her numbers soared like sodium levels during the mail-in ballot counting.
Maddow insisted that California's 30 days of counting is proper: "We all know in advance that's what's going to happen. It's explicit. That's part of the process. That's what happens when the process works properly."
The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read:
MS NOW's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
6/8/26
10:00:56 p.m. Eastern
(...)
LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: Good evening. Rachel. I have to say, it was so great to see Jacob Soboroff tonight where they are counting votes in Los Angeles.And there's so many fascinating points about what he was showing us, including the glass walls. All the walls are glass. It couldn't—It literally could not be more transparent.
And the fact that Donald Trump's U.S. Attorney has been down there with other U.S. Attorneys just walking through the place shows you just how open it is. They didn't see anything, obviously, that they thought should be stopped or should be investigated on the spot or any such thing. And so the count continues.
And I just can't - I'm really glad Jacob's show is premiering this weekend while they—
RACHEL MADDOW: Yes.
O’DONNELL: — will still be counting votes in Los Angeles. We need his show now. It's just the perfect launch period for it to go straight into his expertise about that vote counting in California.
MADDOW: It is also just amazing, Lawrence, that, you know, in advance of the vote, not just this vote, but every time there's a vote in California, right, but in particular with this one, everybody says there's official pronouncements. Everybody reporting on this in the news says in advance, it's going to take weeks to count. It will be weeks before we have the results here. They will not get complete results until 30 days after Election Day.We all know in advance that's what's going to happen. It's explicit, that's part of the process. That's what happens when the process works properly.
And still, Republicans think that people are going to fall for it when they say, as soon as their candidates look like they're going to lose that the length of the counting process is somehow indicative of some sort of problem.
I mean, these sorts of bad faith attacks on the integrity of our elections really, really do depend on the idea that people are stupid.
O'DONNELL: Mhm.
MADDOW: And when people palpably are not stupid, and when people actually pay attention and when stuff actually works the way it's supposed to, I think these - these - these claims that they're making end up not only not working, but really embarrassing and potentially scandalizing, I think the people who they're who they're talking down to.
So, I mean, we'll see how this goes. We'll see if they're able to actually scare people about these results.
But, you know, we'll see what happens tomorrow with their Republican candidate in the governor's race. But I do think they're kind of stepping on a rake here.
(...)
