one-minute vote – A brief timing glitch in how vote totals streamed into election results pages in Los Angeles led some prominent conservatives and allies to claim Spencer Pratt received zero votes—until later updates showed Pratt’s votes were added in a separate batch about a
Late election night in Los Angeles, a simple-looking update hit the internet and landed like a match. On election results pages. a Los Angeles mayor’s race tally briefly showed leading Democrats Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman receiving tens of thousands of new votes. while Republican Spencer Pratt—running behind—showed no new votes at all.
The moment it appeared, screenshots spread quickly. Some people shouted fraud. Others ran statistical checks and argued it would be impossible for a candidate to receive zero votes across such a large batch of ballots.
Elon Musk. the world’s richest man and a former member of President Trump’s inner circle. amplified the suspicion in a sharp post: “They’re not even trying to hide the fraud anymore.” The claim fit into a broader push from Trump and other Republicans in recent days that California Democrats were cheating.
But what followed was the part that got less attention. Another update arrived about a minute later showing tens of thousands of votes for Pratt, and none for Bass or Raman. There was never a single batch of votes in which any candidate received zero votes, Los Angeles County’s own data indicates.
The gap traced back to how vote totals were displayed—via an automated feed that pulled updates from the county in two stages. In a statement to the Times. the Associated Press explained that its “vote count receives updates as provided by election officials and adds them to our vote count.” It said a lag in the automated update caused some candidates’ votes to appear in one refresh and others to follow about a minute later.
Specifically. the statement said an electronic update from the Los Angeles County website pulled in votes for one group of candidates. including Bass and Raman. Exactly one minute later, it picked up votes for another group of candidates, including 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.
The Los Angeles Times’ election results page relies on the AP’s data feed and checks for updates once a minute. The Times reviewed its election night results data and said it pulled data from the AP’s feed at approximately 8:35 p.m. that included 0 new votes for Pratt and eight other candidates. When its system checked again a minute later. the paper said there was an update with votes for Pratt but no new votes for Raman. Bass. or others.
Michael Sanchez, a spokesperson for Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office, said he could not speak for how news outlets report county data, but he confirmed there were no batches of votes that included zero votes for Pratt.
“It is false,” Sanchez said of the narrative. “In every single result update that we released on election night and since election night, he has received votes,” Sanchez said.
A separate analysis arrived at the same conclusion. Justin Grimmer. a political science professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who researches and evaluates claims of election fraud. conducted his own review of the vote updates. He said he found an initial update showing no Pratt votes. followed by a second update 41 seconds later showing no votes for Bass or Raman. To him, that pattern suggested the single batch of ballots was being reported as two back-to-back updates rather than one.
Grimmer said speed mattered—news outlets are “thinking about speed” to deliver information quickly—but that they hadn’t fully adjusted to a reality in which a group of people monitors these data feeds as if they were official government reports.
“It leads to these horrible tweets about there being evidence of fraud,” Grimmer said.
He also described his approach to fraud claims in general. saying they can’t be dismissed “by mere assertion” that wrongdoing didn’t happen. Grimmer said he dived into the data because the claim reminded him of odd-seeming vote-tally stories that circulated during and after the 2020 election of Joe Biden over Trump.
Grimmer said he was able to validate what was happening by looking directly at how the page feed worked—describing it as a process of checking the page’s source code, finding the feed, downloading it, and then seeing the sequence of updates.
He said he understood why people might watch so closely. There is, he said, a group of individuals convinced that “there’s lots of fraud going on in U.S. elections,” and who believe that careful monitoring of data feeds will reveal proof.
Grimmer said he would not presume to tell news outlets how to do their jobs delivering election results quickly. Still, he said he hoped they balance speed with the fact that their feeds are being monitored by people looking for fraud in tiny timing differences.
Sanchez reiterated that the county’s official results have been accurate. He said that “at no point” did the county office “report an official results update in which Pratt received zero votes.”
Los Angeles mayor's race Spencer Pratt Karen Bass Nithya Raman vote count election fraud claims AP vote feed Los Angeles County registrar Dean Logan Elon Musk