On the night of November 3, 2020, President Donald Trump held a comfortable lead over his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, in the presidential election. By the following morning, however, and over the course of the following days and weeks, batches of late mail-in ballots not only ate away at Trump’s lead but would eventually hand the White House to Biden.

The resulting controversy and allegations of widespread election fraud crippled the trust that many Americans have in the nation’s elections, with countless voters fearing that their ballots were simply being canceled out by the Democratic Party’s fraud machine. Now, with national attention focused on the jungle primaries in Democrat-dominated California, many Americans are witnessing the same thing happen in microcosm.

When Golden State voters cast their ballots nearly a week ago, Republican strategist Steve Hilton quickly took the lead in the race for California governor, while reality star-turned-Republican candidate Spencer Pratt soared to a close second in the race for mayor of Los Angeles. Now, as batches of mail-in ballot are being counted, the Republican candidates are watching their leads disappear. Hilton has fallen to second place in the gubernatorial primary, while former Biden administration Health Secretary Xavier Becerra has not only taken the lead but has been formally slated to advance to the November election. Last Tuesday, Hilton led Becerra by roughly 120,000 votes (2.4% of the vote at the time) and Democrat Tom Steyer by nearly half a million votes (almost 10 full percentage points). Now, Hilton is trailing Becerra by nearly 100,000 votes and has a narrower lead of roughly 300,000 votes over Steyer.

Much the same is occurring in Los Angeles, where incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D) advanced to the general election, despite her record on rampant crime and the disastrous Palisades fires that ravaged broad swaths of the greater L.A. area early last year. Over the weekend, L.A. Councilwoman and Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman, who had been trailing behind Spencer Pratt by nearly 10 percentage points, surged to overtake the Republican, now leading him by just over 3,000 votes.

The rapid advance of Democratic candidates via batches of mail-in ballots has caught the attention of the White House. The president abruptly ended an interview on Sunday, citing NBC News’s dishonesty in covering what Trump called “rigged” elections in California. When “Meet the Press” anchor Kristin Welker suggested that Republicans were performing better than expected in the blue state’s elections, Trump fired back, “They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election.” Welker defended California’s primary and vote-counting process, which could possibly see two Democrats advance to the general election in both the gubernatorial race and the Los Angeles mayoral race. “Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump responded. “You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged, your network knows that they’re rigged.”

“We’re like a third-world country,” Trump said of the failure to secure elections. “Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked,” he added, storming out of the interview. “You’re a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let’s call it quits, because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

When Welker pressed the president for “evidence” of election fraud, Trump replied, “You have more evidence, there’s more evidence than ever presented,” adding, “All I have to do is look.” Well, he’s looking. On Friday, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli confirmed that his office has launched “multiple election fraud investigations” in conjunction with the FBI’s Los Angeles field office. “California’s election system has serious structural vulnerabilities. Universal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements creates conditions where fraud can go undetected and unpunished, eroding public confidence,” Essayli said on social media. “We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent,” he added. “My office will not look the other way. We will investigate and prosecute. Every legal vote deserves to be counted. Every illegal vote cancels one out.”

In a separate post, Essayli reported that California’s Secretary of State allows first-time voters to register to vote using gym membership cards, employer IDs, credit or debit cards, prescription drug labels, insurance cards (“California provides free health coverage to undocumented immigrants,” the prosecutor noted), and other forms of identification that Essayli said “most Americans would find surprising…” California also allows ballot harvesting, permitting third-party individuals and organizations to collect ballots from voters and deposit them to be counted.

“We also have serious concerns about how California maintains its voter rolls. There are open questions about whether the state is promptly removing deceased voters, people who have moved, and individuals convicted of disqualifying felonies,” Essayli added. Nevertheless, he shared that California’s Secretary of State is actively refusing to allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to audit the state’s voter rolls. “If California genuinely wants voters to trust its elections, it should open its records, not fight to keep them closed. What are they afraid of?”