Mike Johnson Knows CA Elections Were Rigged Against Spencer Pratt Because Vibes
He can just tell, okay?
It’s official: former reality television villain Spencer Pratt is no longer in the running to become Los Angeles’s next top city government official. After pushing past him over the weekend, progressive candidate Nithya Raman knocked him out of the mayoral race and will now compete against incumbent Karen Bass for the title, and now the rest of us can hopefully go back to not thinking of Pratt ever again (at least until the next time they reboot The Surreal Life).
Well, most of us anyway. Republicans have gone relatively bananas about the results, insisting, with zero evidence, that the whole thing must have been rigged. After all, how could all the California liberals they’re always whining about not vote for him?
But do they need any actual evidence of any kind? They do not! According to House Speaker Mike Johnson, no “evidence” is really necessary because they can tell it’s rigged, because of their “instincts.”
“They are counting votes weeks after the election,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol on Monday. “I’m not saying it’s rigged. I’m saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that.”
No, “everybody” does not know that, because it is not true. The fact is, no matter how the votes were counted, if a Republican loses, Republicans will “feel” that it was rigged. They also have a long and storied history of demanding that vote counting stop as soon as their candidate is ahead, as some may recall from the 2000 election. (During which, may I note, they were happy to believe that dozens of Jewish retirees in Palm Beach County voted for noted anti-semite and Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan.)
“Let’s remove the appearance of impropriety. Let’s have — what a concept! — let’s have votes on an election the day of the election. That’s what many states are able to do, I think California is playing around with us.”
No one is “playing around” with you, Mike Johnson. This is the way California elections work. The state sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot and the vast majority of people in the state vote by mail rather than in person. People are allowed to mail-in their ballots on the day of an election, so what would really be hinky would be not counting those votes.
Election Day, nota bene, is not an official holiday in the United States. There is no law saying that businesses must give people a paid day off to go vote, meaning that even if those states are able to to that, fewer people will be able to vote. Granted, that’s good for Republicans, historically, but it’s not actually good for democracy. Even if that were the case, there might be other reasons why people might not be able to spend hours in line waiting to vote on any one particular day. Having early voting and mail-in-ballots gives more people the chance to have their vote counted. Duh.
Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju whether he had any actual evidence of voter fraud, Johnson didn’t seem to think that was necessary, because people can just tell something is wrong, possibly because of how their elected leaders keep saying that there is something wrong.
“Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream that it’s impossible to prove, but I think everybody knows instinctively, something is wrong here, and that’s a concern,” Johnson said.
Did one of Spencer Pratt’s crystals tell him that? Should we now just decide elections based on “vibes” and what Mike Johnson’s psychic powers tell him “everybody” believes? Why even bother letting people vote in the first place if that’s how we can tell who won? Surely it would save a lot of time, money and effort on all of our parts.
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The fact is, the only way Republicans will accept the results of an election as legitimate is if they win. That is their metric for fair vs. unfair elections, even in areas where the vast majority of voters are Democrats, and Donald Trump has been very clear about this.
"They want to cheat," Trump said during a State of the Union speech in March. "Their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat, and we're going to stop it."
And yet, somehow, while Joe Biden was President, Donald Trump still won the election in 2024.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
If Speaker Johnson wants California to count votes faster, Speaker Johnson can use his position to push through a supplemental funding bill to pay temporary workers to count ballots, because the poorer red counties in NorCal simply don’t have the money to pay extra workers.
If Speaker Johnson is unwilling to be part of the solution, he can shut his bitch ass up.
Rachel said last night that Mike Johnson's home state also has mail-in voting. He thinks it is excessive (and suspicious) that it takes California five days to count 13 million mail-in votes while it is perfectly fine that Louisiana takes the same five days to count 119,000.