If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and leaves piles of duck excrement on the grass, it is likely a duck.
Also, you found the damn duck. Saying it is a moose doesn't make it so.
As Bill Essayli, who is investigating voter fraud in Los Angeles after the stinky mayoral election, points out, the Los Angeles Times is gaslighting its readers by claiming that suspicions about voter fraud on Skid Row are unfounded.
You see, the Times wants to refute not just the general claims that things smell bad, but also the evidence from people who asked homeless people on Skid Row about it. Those homeless people said they were paid to vote for Karen Bass or Nithya Raman.
Skid Row homeless claim they've been paid to vote for Karen Bass and Nithya Raman https://t.co/vK1OUgBZwN pic.twitter.com/c3U3lBw3ks
— California Post (@californiapost) June 10, 2026
I've seen several of these videos, and while I don't exactly take the word of any one homeless person, the evidence is piling up, especially since there are plenty of videos showing signature gatherers paying people to forge names and addresses on ballot issues.
The Times wants you to believe they didn't find any evidence, except...they did.
The @LATimes headline says voter fraud claims are “unfounded” — then their own reporting confirms it.
— F.A. United States Attorney Bill Essayli (@USAttyEssayli) June 12, 2026
Their article documents homeless individuals being paid cash to register to vote. That’s a federal crime under 52 U.S.C. § 10307(c).
“Three people told The Times they accepted…
The @LATimes headline says voter fraud claims are “unfounded” — then their own reporting confirms it.
Their article documents homeless individuals being paid cash to register to vote. That’s a federal crime under 52 U.S.C. § 10307(c).
“Three people told The Times they accepted a couple dollars to sign, with one saying he signed multiple signatures using various names and received $10."
That’s not unfounded. That’s voter fraud and it’s exactly why there must be investigations.
This reminds me of the PolitiFact "fact check" that claimed that Mamdani wasn't a communist, even though he wants to "seize the means of production" and quotes Karl Marx.
Don't believe your lying eyes. Believe me.
The whole point of this exercise is simply to give talking points to people. Nobody cites evidence; they cite authorities.
"The L.A. Times said the accusations are unfounded!" That makes the people who want to hear it feel warm and fuzzy. These are the same people who think Adam Schiff is the bee's knees, and that Graham Platner is a misunderstood working-class saint. They just want to be told that everything is fine.
A handful of people interviewed by The Times said they had seen workers gathering signatures for ballot petitions, offering cash to persuade homeless people to sign, with some saying the workers also registered people to vote, which is a requirement to sign a ballot petition.
Three people told The Times they accepted a couple dollars to sign, with one saying he signed multiple signatures using various names and received $10.
That scheme has landed people in court and has been pointed to by some as reason to believe voter fraud occurred last week.
In May, the U.S. Justice Department announced a Marina del Rey woman admitted in a plea agreement that she illegally paid people on Skid Row to register to vote so they could sign ballot petitions, because she was paid based on the number of voter signatures she was able to collect.
In some cases, when the homeless individuals didn’t have an address, she provided them with her former address in Los Angeles, and since California sends mail-in ballots to all voters with an address, ballots could have been sent to where the voters didn’t live, the plea agreement says.
The point of the article is to soothe people's worries, so the details didn't get reported until well into the story. First we got a bunch of throat-clearing about how hard it is to change election results, and how even a bit of voter fraud is no big deal.
And then some fine, upstanding fentanyl addicts and local residents said: "Nobody paid me."
Well, OK. But others said that they, indeed, were paid to break election laws, and did.
Is any of that proof that the Los Angeles mayor's election was stolen? Well, the Los Angeles Times talked to a whopping 20 people, of whom only a few admitted they broke the law, so no.
Does it show that there is a machine that spreads money around to cheat in elections? Of course it does.
Now, as one of my commenters pointed out a few days ago, this is nothing new. Cheating in elections is as old as elections themselves. What's new is the whole-of-media effort to deny it could be possible. So new, in fact, that in 2016 and 2018 we were flooded with claims by Democrats and the media about how Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams really won those elections.
Election denial, as they call it, only became a threat to democracy after the 2020 election. Suddenly it was treason.
Even without cheating, the deck was stacked against Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles for the general election. What makes these results so hinky is the sudden surge of Nithya Raman votes post-election night, and the fact that Skid Row turnout surged for Raman in particular. And that Skid Row is provably where election fraud is especially easy and common, with people paying for illegal election activities.
Even The Los Angeles Times found it in an hour or so, talking to only 20 people.
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