Fox contributor on Spencer Pratt loss: “The actual result is not a huge surprise”
Byron York: “In the city of Los Angeles, Democrats outnumber Republicans by four to one. So, the idea that Pratt could either win or even place second place in a primary was kind of unrealistic.”
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From the June 9, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
AINSLEY EARNHARDT (HOST): This morning, Spencer Pratt is out, as LA voters officially chose a Democratic socialist to take on far-left Mayor Karen Bass in the November runoff election.
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This race is raising questions about the state's voting process after taking almost a week to call it. Fox News contributor Byron York joins us now. Hey Byron.
BYRON YORK (GUEST): Good morning.
EARHARDT: Good morning. What's your reaction first of all to Spencer Pratt being out and we have these two far left-leaning candidates?
YORK: Well, I'm not terribly surprised. In the city of Los Angeles, Democrats outnumber Republicans by four to one. So, the idea that Pratt could either win or even place second place in a primary was kind of unrealistic. Also, if you look at the last poll before the election, which was conducted by the UC Berkeley and the Los Angeles Times, it had Pratt about three points behind Nithya Rahman, and that's kind of where he appears to be right now. So, the actual result is not a huge surprise. The process was terrible.
EARHARDT: Yeah, what is up with this, Byron? You have to postmark your vote. Everyone gets a mail-in ballot after COVID. Then that has to be postmarked on Election Day, which was last Tuesday. Then the election commission, I guess, they give you seven days for all the ballots to come in and to be counted. So, that brings us to today.
YORK: Yeah, there, there's so many things wrong with California's process, and we should say that there are other states that do large numbers of mail-in ballots that don't have these problems. Colorado is all mail-in ballots, and they manage to count theirs. Florida has a huge number of mail-in ballots and a large number of others as well, and they managed to get results overnight like every other 21st century state. California has a lot of rules that make this very, very slow. One, you said you don't have to actually vote by Election Day — cast your vote by Election Day. You have to put something in the mail. If it's postmarked by Election Day, they have seven days to wait to get it. They have all sorts of processes which they say they carefully check these mail-in ballots. They verify the signatures, but we have a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggests they don't really do that very much. Now, not on the time process, but just something terrible that they allow is ballot harvesting, which is that they allow politically interested groups like political parties and campaigns and unions to collect ballots from voters and then deliver them to the authorities. So for some period of time all those ballots are in the hands of the union or the campaign for goodness sakes. So it's just a system that it seems designed to create suspicions and undermine confidence in the final result.
EARHARDT: I know. I don't understand why they don't change it. There's also something that the nostalgia of waking up the next day and finding out who won after you've gone to the polls or that night, everyone glued to their TVs like we do on Election Day when, when it's a presidential election.