What’s happening today?
🗳️ Election results could take a week to settle, especially in close contests like the LA mayor’s race
It’s Election Day, with polls closing at 8 p.m. tying up about a month-long period of voting. Look up a nearby vote center here, or a drop box here. You can track your ballot here. Los Angeles County election officials will be posting results here. Those results, specifically the statewide races and measures, then get added to the Secretary of State’s election results page, which is where you should check for state Assembly, Senate and statewide ballot measure results.
In LA County, the first batch of election results will be released at 8:30 p.m., and semi-official results are supposed to be posted by the end of the evening, which can stretch into the wee hours the next morning. But the actual results likely won’t be known for about another week, especially if a race is close, as the LA mayor’s race is anticipated to be. For the June 2 primary this year, it took six to seven days before vote-by-mail and other ballots that were still being counted began showing that in the LA mayor’s race, LA City Council member Nithya Raman had made it into a runoff position with Mayor Karen Bass – Spencer Pratt was initially in the second-place runoff spot – and that it would hold. Raman and Bass could switch places, depending on if voters who cast ballots late or by mail tend to prefer one candidate over the other. Similar shifts – over the course of several days of ballot counting – have occurred in past LA city races, most notably when then-challenger Eunisses Hernandez surged ahead of the incumbent Gil Cedillo in the 1st District race back in 2022, in the later results, ultimately winning the race.
To get into some further detail, the LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk has a schedule for when they plan on counting certain types of ballots. The first batch of results at 8:30 p.m. will consist of votes from the mail-in ballots received before today – in other words, by the end of Monday, Nov. 2. By 9 p.m., they plan to have counted the votes cast at ballot centers, as of the end of Monday. After 9 p.m. election officials plan to begin releasing votes cast on Election Day. They will be releasing so-called “semi-official results” after votes from today are added to the results.
Then for the rest of the week, the elections officials plan to keep 24-hour diner hours. There will be one release of results on Wednesday, two on Thursday, and then three on Friday. They will be mostly counting what’s left, which will be vote-by-mail ballots post-marked as of election day, conditional ballots cast by people who registered to vote on election day, and provisional ballots. Technically, the Registrar needs to keep checking their mailboxes for a full week, or until next Tuesday. They can wrap up counting sooner, but election officials have marked off their calendars to keep counting and verifying ballots right up until Nov. 27 if needed.
My newsletter focuses mostly on the LA city races, which are officially nonpartisan. But discussion of political parties often still creeps into our collective analysis of results – so if you’re interested in some hard numbers, at least in terms of how people are registered, LA county election officials put out a report on the registrations as of Oct. 19, which is 15 days ago (past reports are here). The Secretary of State also gathers together registrations from jurisdictions across California.
What’s squawking: 🪖 LAPD military equipment: Agenda // 💵 Fire department budget: Agenda
A bit more on what’s on the Squawk Box:
🪖 The Sheriff’s Department has recently been going through its annual process of re-upping their military equipment policy and reporting on their inventory of equipment – in accordance with AB 481 – and today, the LAPD is doing the same. Their equipment policy is on the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners 9:30 a.m. meeting agenda. Of note in the included report is that the LAPD’s professional standards bureau received 75 complaints in 2025 about the use of military equipment, including tear gas, battering rams, flashbang devices, 40mm launchers, less-lethal projectiles and bean bag shotguns. The latest LAPD report includes some mention of working with the City Controller, which put out an audit report in 2024 on LAPD’s compliance with AB 481, on a public dashboard about their military equipment. The law enforcement agencies that also must comply with AB 481 include university and K-12 school police.
The police commission agenda also includes two items related to LAPD officials’ interactions with federal immigration enforcement officials, which comes after LA leaders recently raised alarm over a widely circulated video of a violent abduction by ICE in North Hollywood (which happened amid an ongoing surge). The monthly report that’s on the agenda covers September, and would not include some of the more recent high-profile incidents and the surge that people noticed beginning in October.
💵 The Los Angeles Fire Department submits its proposed budget to the Board of Fire Commissioners each year, and a preliminary version of that, focusing on requests for new or expanded funding, is before that panel at their 9 a.m. meeting. Some of the programs the department is asking for includes creating a separate firefighting unit for the 2028 Olympics, and for wildfire mitigation resources in the Sepulveda Basin.
LA city departments submit these proposals to the mayor’s office around this time in the fall, in response to instructions given in a mayoral policy letter. While this year’s letter is not yet up on the mayor’s website, city officials provide me with a copy of it that I’ve uploaded here. The full proposals from each department are due by Nov. 19. The “preliminary” proposal that the Fire Commission is reviewing today had been due (to the mayor’s office) on Oct. 16, and departments are supposed to be getting notes from the mayor’s office about them so that they can be used to develop the full proposal. The mayor’s office puts out a budget proposal by April 20 of each year . One of the city measures on the ballot today, though, would move LA from an annual to a two year budgeting cycle, if passed.
What just happened?
Black Lives Matter Grassroots leader endorses Nithya Raman over longtime friend Karen Bass
Black Lives Matter Grassroots co-founder Melina Abdullah publicly urged people to vote for Nithya Raman in a video posted early Monday. But the story behind this endorsement leans a bit more toward the disappointment that she has experienced over the decisions Karen Bass has made as mayor, and what Bass’s policies might entail for a possible second term.
Abdullah, a professor who has followed Karen Bass’s political career and looked to her as a source of hope for advancing progressive policies, returned to some of the issues she had raised in an open letter she published a year ago that said Bass had broken her heart. In the latest video, Abdullah described Bass as a “longtime friend,” saying that “I care for her, and I love her.” She also said that this election is not about “who deserves a lifetime achievement award.”
In this mayoral race, Bass, who has been known, in her early activism, as someone who fought and stood up against police-led oppression, is backed by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police officers union. And Abdullah noted that Bass pushed the appointment of someone she describes in her video as one of the worst possible choices for police chief, Jim McDonnell – someone who had antagonized the immigrant rights community during his term as LA County Sheriff that coincided with President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies during his first term as president. Bass also pushed for raises for police officers and an increased budget for the Los Angeles Police Department – even as the City Council had been trying to scale it back in a recent budget cycle, amid a budget crisis.
Policies that scale back on the influence and role of policing have often been dismissed as politically unviable, and especially after the last election 2024, when Proposition 36, which undid earlier criminal justice reform policies. But this mayoral election might be putting that to a test. Some of Abdullahs’ moral minimums by which she decides how she votes, have started to feature a bit more in a lot of LA Council member Nithya Raman’s platform, with making policing one of the areas where the Raman and Bass now seem to diverge the most on (aside from housing construction), at least in their framing of Raman’s attacks on Bass and with Raman saying in recent weeks she would replace McDonnell as police chief.
A couple more things…
Nithya Raman is still endorsed by DSA-LA. The DSA’s national committee voted narrowly against rescinding their endorsement. Peter Sterne of City and State New York reports that the DSA’s national political committee voted narrowly against rescinding DSA-LA’s endorsement of Raman. Sterne also provided a detailed rundown of some of the procedural steps that have transpired over the course of the last few weeks, and he notes that the vote on Monday came after Raman “did not attend the meeting of DSA-LA membership on her BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction) position.” Noah Goldberg’s article on this in the LA Times highlights that the local chapter’s leadership opposed this effort to rescind their endorsement, and that the chapter’s members have been canvassing for Raman.
And President Trump tried to get the Supreme Court to set aside 20,000 California ballots that he alleges are from noncitizens, but he was quickly rejected.