Indio Mayor Mike Wilson is now behind Waymond Fermon in the race to represent the newly created District 2 in the city, but don’t look for him to concede anytime soon as, according to KESQ, Wilson says he believes “ballot harvesting took place” and that some ballots were “delivered on election day to stuff absentee ballot boxes.”
Wilson’s comments come as a tight race has swung to a 138 vote lead for Fermon. Wilson said his campaign intends to further explore the issue as ballots continue to be counted – with about 2,000 vote-by-mail and 36,000 provisional ballots still to be processed by the county.
“Mathematically and statistically those extra ballots just don’t show up in a block after three weeks of counting showed this race would be decided by a very small handful of votes,” Wilson said in a statement.
There was no word in the statement about how, exactly, Wilson would “explore” his hypothesis of ballot harvesting.
The comments come a couple days after right-wing websites have begun posting about “ballot harvesting” in California as an excuse for why Republicans lost so many congressional seats in the state.
Outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan also whined about California counting every vote, saying that the election had “a very, very strange outcome.” He added, “When you win the absentee ballots and you win the in-person vote, where I come from, you win the election.”
When pressed, Ryan said he wasn’t “saying there’s anything nefarious about it, … but we believed we were up about six seats in California the night of the election, now I think we lost just about every single one of those.”
In the Washington Post write up about Ryan’s comments, the paper states, “Ryan said he wouldn’t go so far as to ask the state attorney general to review the results but suggested that The Washington Post should write a story about it,” suggesting Ryan doesn’t actually believe what he is saying, but would like the press to write about it to cause doubt in the elections.
Perhaps he was just “exploring” it.
