For President Trump, any Democratic election victory is suspicious on its face. Even, apparently, in one of the most liberal cities in America.
“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Monday. “3rd World Nation.”
On election night last Tuesday, Mr. Pratt — the reality-television personality and Trump-endorsed Republican — led the progressive city councilwoman Nithya Raman for second place to advance to November’s mayoral runoff, behind the incumbent, Mayor Karen Bass, who is also a Democrat.
But as election officials spent the following week counting late-arriving mail ballots, which were disproportionately from Democrats, Ms. Raman edged ahead of Mr. Pratt. Such fleeting Republican leads are common enough to have a name — the “red mirage” — yet Mr. Trump, as he did in his own 2020 loss, cast the slow count as proof of theft.
By baselessly framing Ms. Raman’s rise as a Democratic scam, Mr. Trump extended his long-running project to erode public faith in elections — and gave an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake.
He has been anything but subtle about his desire to limit the ability of Democrats to vote by mail, implying, with no evidence, that simply choosing that widely used means of casting a ballot is inherently suspect. Addressing a gathering of Republican lawmakers in March, he said the way to hold their majority was to pass a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots.
“It’ll guarantee the midterms,” he told them, warning that failure would bring “big trouble.”
Privately, according to one senior adviser, he has pressed aides to find ways to “stop them stealing it from us.”
What is striking so far is how little of this has survived contact with reality. Voting legislation he has championed, the SAVE Act, cleared the House but stalled in the Senate, where Republicans lack the votes to break a Democratic filibuster. Among other things, the bill would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and would compel states to share voter rolls with the federal government.
An executive order he signed in March directing the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a federal list of eligible voters and barring the Postal Service from delivering mail ballots to anyone left off it was condemned by election experts as illegal and drew multiple lawsuits.
Still, even if Mr. Trump fails to change election laws or processes, he can sow substantial chaos simply by trying to convince voters that the results were fraudulent.
More than five years after his supporters, fueled by lies about a stolen election, stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power, Mr. Trump has tried to recast Jan. 6, 2021, as a day of “peace,” claiming his supporters were led astray by F.B.I. officers in a false-flag operation. He has produced no credible evidence, yet he has pardoned rioters who breached the Capitol and has entertained paying restitution to some of them, over the objections of even some in his own party.
His fraud claims about California could matter especially in November. The House majority rests on a thin margin, with Republicans holding 218 seats to Democrats’ 213. After California voters approved Proposition 50 in November — a constitutional amendment pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to permit a redrawing of the state’s congressional map — Democrats have a chance to flip as many as five Republican-held seats, potentially enough to take the chamber.
Many of those seats lie in the same Central Valley and Orange County districts whose ballots take days or weeks to tally. In other words, the races that may decide control of Congress could be counted in precisely the slow way Mr. Trump reflexively calls fraud. Elon Musk has amplified the message, arguing that the combination of no voter ID and mail-in ballots amounts to legalized fraud.
Mr. Trump has leveled the same accusation at California’s governor’s race, in which the Republican Steve Hilton is fighting for the second spot that would set up a November runoff against the Democrat Xavier Becerra.
After complaining about “rigged elections” in his Monday social media post, the president added: “Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials.”
This year, California had an unusually competitive primary election for governor, driving up turnout and raising the stakes of the statewide count. To add to the issue, many Democrats waited to return their mail ballots as the field shifted and as some were concerned that Democrats could get locked out of the top two spots.
Asked whether Mr. Trump had any evidence to support his claims that the California elections were being rigged, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said he was “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of our elections.” That pledge, she added, is “why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” adding that Mr. Trump would implement measures to “secure our elections for generations to come.”
During his losing 2020 campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly made baseless claims that mail-in voting was rife with fraud. In that election, Democrats, many of whom were strictly adhering to pandemic protocols, were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, who tended to prefer to vote in person on Election Day — a partisan divide that persists today. Yet Mr. Trump’s crusade against mail-in votes that year alarmed Republican legislative leaders, who privately tried explaining to him that many of the party’s own voters were older and cast ballots that way.
Several states took days to finish counting mail-in ballots in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s share of the vote grew each day, eventually allowing him to overtake Mr. Trump in the state and win the election.
Since 2020, many states have made significant investments to speed up their abilities to count mail-in votes quickly. In California, however, it is still common for it to take days or even weeks before enough votes have been counted for news organizations to declare a winner.
This year’s election in California was primed to create even more of a red mirage effect than normal. Facing late upheaval in the governor’s contest after the departure from the race of Eric Swalwell, a congressman at the time, many Democrats waited until the last minute to return their ballots. That meant that the first ballots to be counted and reported were more Republican than normal, and the ballots reported after Election Day have been even more Democratic than is typical.
Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc. in Sacramento and an expert in California voter turnout, said that his firm’s data showed that the share of Democratic voters’ ballots being processed has far outpaced the share of Republican ballots in recent days, and that the distance had widened.
California sends every regular voter a mail ballot that can be returned at their convenience. It gives a weeklong grace period for ballots to arrive as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. The state allows voters registered at old addresses or those not registered at all to fill out provisional ballots that become valid if election officials verify their information and deem them eligible. And it allows voters with mismatched signatures on file to resolve discrepancies once they are detected.
All of those provisions make voting easier for residents in California than in many other states, but they add various checkpoints in the system to ensure security, each of which costs time.
“In California and Los Angeles, we have our election laws written in a way that maximizes participation,” said Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrar of voters.
Mr. Mitchell, who is a Democratic consultant, said that, paradoxically, the most effective way to speed up California’s count would be to eliminate security protocols, like cutting ballot signature verification or checks on voter registration for provisional voters.
“I don’t think Republicans would want that,” he said.
Other election experts said that California suffered from logistical problems. Each of California’s 58 counties is responsible for running its own election, and many lack sufficient resources to verify mail ballots and count votes quickly. They may not have enough workers, space or machines to process ballots in quick order.
State lawmakers passed at least three bills last year designed to speed up the count, but the changes seemed to have marginal effect, given where things stood on Monday, with only about three-quarters of the ballots counted six days after the election.
The bills shortened the deadline to finish counting most ballots, to 13 days from 30 days. They also allowed election officials to begin processing ballots earlier than before and required slightly more frequent updates of results.
But elections are largely county-funded, and most of California’s counties lack the resources to keep staff on constant rotation, said Kim Alexander, who runs the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation.
“We expect our counties to provide all these services to facilitate elections, and the state and federal governments aren’t paying their fair share of the cost,” she said.
Nick Corasaniti, Christine Zhang, Luke Vrotsos, Jill Cowan and Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.
