You’d think California would be good at governing. I mean, they do so dang much of it.

Instead, in a state that has enjoyed one-party rule with bullet-proof supermajorities in both state houses, the opposite is true, and the state’s laughable election system is Exhibit A. Well, okay, it’s Exhibit B. Exhibit A is surely the fact that a third of our nation’s welfare recipients live in California. But I digress.

Yesterday, the state’s residents got a taste of just how reliably rigged their system is when the Appropriated Press reported that hard-left City Councilwoman Nithya Raman had overtaken upstart Republican Spencer Pratt for second place in the latest vote count for the Los Angeles mayoral contest. The AP hadn’t yet called the race for incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Raman, both of whom would advance to the November 3 runoff election, but that seems only a matter of time.

Thus, on November 3, Angelenos will get a governing choice not between Left and Right but between hard Left and even harder Left. On the bright side, of course, they’re getting the government they deserve, and they’re getting it good and hard.

I mentioned that this might happen in last week’s post-election piece, and sure enough. But I was more concerned about Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton getting leap-frogged by ecofascist billionaire Tom Steyer than I was about Pratt getting caught by Raman. Hilton seems safely situated in second place, but that’s because while Democrats enjoy a 2:1 registration advantage statewide, registered Republicans account for less than one-fifth of Los Angeles County voters. And even less than that when we factor in the illegal vote. How can such stuff not undermine public confidence in the state’s ability to govern itself?

It’s incredible that these Angelenos, these slowly boiling frogs, think that the answer to all their problems — to the drugs and crime and poverty and homelessness and administrative incompetence — isn’t less unchecked leftism but rather more unchecked leftism.

Columnist John Fund, who co-wrote the book on how the Left has hijacked our elections, had this to say about California:

The system is indeed a designed mess: A voter can return a ballot in any county in California, no matter which county that voter is registered in. A decade ago, California legalized ballot-harvesting — which allows anyone to collect and deliver a limitless number of mail-in ballots — which increases the risk of fraud or coercion. The state mails ballots to all registered voters, 23.2 million of them. Ballots received by officials up to seven days after Election Day are counted.

Tom Del Beccaro, a former GOP state chairman, told me that he has received four duplicate ballots at his address and that his neighbors often get ballots for people who no longer live there. A lawsuit against California’s secretary of state by the nonprofit organization Judicial Watch claims that there are 873,000 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who have moved or died or who don’t have an address but are still getting ballots. In 2024, a previous Judicial Watch lawsuit had forced Los Angeles County to remove 1.2 million inactive voter registrations.

And so, to the long list of reasons why Gavin Newsom can’t be trusted with keys to the car — much less keys to the White House — we can now add election integrity. The guy has been governor of California for eight years, and his state’s elections during that time have somehow gotten even worse.

Florida, which is governed by America’s Best Governor™, the guy who mopped the floor with Newsom in a mano a girlymano debate a few years back, can tell us which presidential candidate carried the Sunshine State before the late-night hacks have delivered their dreary Trump-deranged monologues. India, of all places, can count 600 million votes in a day. Folks, Haitians and Afghans and North Koreans are telling knee-slappers about California’s third-world, banana-republican election system. Newsom’s state is a laughingstock, the butt of every joke about government incompetence and venality.

If ever an airtight case could be made for the wildly popular SAVE America Act, this would be it. Alas, John Thune and his fellow do-nothing Senate Republicans are gonna, well, do nothing.

As Steve Hilton himself put it on Fox News over the weekend, “It’s a total disaster. Sixteen years of Democrat one-party rule. We’ve ended up with the highest poverty rate, the highest unemployment rate, the highest cost of living in the country. Everywhere you look — crime, chaos, homelessness, the high-speed rail they can’t finish, and now they can’t even count votes properly.”

Hilton, though, saved his best for last. “And here’s the lesson for the rest of the country,” he said. “California today is what you get when Democrats get everything they want. Vote accordingly.”

And that, my friends, is a lesson that applies not just to Californians but to all Americans.