Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS JUN 9, 2026

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: my community’s tragic loss of a heroic small-firm covid lawyer and a deep-dive on the LA mayoral race— what we know, don’t know and why it may not matter so much in the big picture, since the Administration’s careful planning last year is paying off anyway, not just in spite of Spencer Pratt’s mail-in ballot problems but also because of them.

⛑️ C&C ARMY POST ⛑️

Warner Mendhall, 66, the heroic small-firm lawyer, selfless pandemic legal champion, and my friend, from Akron, Ohio, passed away this weekend from what we would call turbo cancer. Late last year, he was surprised by an initial diagnosis at stage 4C. Not seven days ago, he was still tweeting. I’d even heard he was doing better. But I was profoundly shocked by the news of his passing. Maybe it wasn’t sudden, but it feels sudden. I’d allowed myself to feel hopeful.

CLIP: Warner explains the difficulty of getting experts for covid lawsuits and then protecting them from career destruction (1:45).

I first conferred with Warner early in the pandemic, before any of us were known for our covid work. I’d originally tracked him down because I’d heard he was having some success suing hospitals that refused ivermectin to their severe covid patients and wouldn’t even discharge them. (I was just starting to accept a flood of the same types of cases, which, around the office, we referred to as “hospital kidnapping.”) Much later, Warner would be involved in ultra-high-profile cases like Brooke Jackson and Grace Shaara.

Over the years, Warner and I occasionally traded calls for professional advice on one issue or another, and we often bumped into each other on the speaking circuit. I distinctly remember sharing conference stages with him in Atlanta and in Las Vegas. There were probably more.

Warner was an all-in Christian. He was humble, patient, and kind— soft-spoken on the outside but with an unyielding iron core; he never backed down from a fight. He took so many pro bono (no charge) cases that I figured he was either independently wealthy or had rewritten the economic rules for small law firms. The truth was, he was selfless and sacrificed his income for five years for others.

I spoke to Warner after news of his cancer diagnosis became public. I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing that he never took a jab. (And you’ll never convince me his cancer was unrelated to spike protein, either from the virus or second-hand from a shot.) Since Warner was connected to all the heterodox doctors in MAHA, he was trying the alternative treatments you’re probably wondering about. Sadly, there are no absolute cures for this cancer pandemic.

Warner, my brother, we are deeply grateful for you. Now, your Earthly labors and sufferings have been perfected. You have gone to Glory, and for that, I envy you. We who remain here in the temporal realm will miss you, a lot, but we shall continue the fight until we also join you in paradise, at which time we can pick up that conversation we never finished about tips for dealing with difficult judges. Till then.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times, with barely restrained glee, reported, “Democrat Secures Second L.A. Mayor Spot and Ends Spencer Pratt’s Run.” Social media wildfires are burning over the totally believable once-in-a-lifetime statistical miracle in mail-in balloting —another one!— that has launched far-left socialist candidate Nithya “Noodle” Raman from so far in last place she’d already given her concession speech to second place overall. Happily for Democrats, this last-minute magical-ballot turnaround has vaporized scrappy Spencer Pratt, the only Republican in the race.

Officially, it’s still too soon to start analyzing the results, since the election isn’t over. Haha, you probably thought it must be over since it happened a week ago, but that is because you are using non-California logic. In the Golden State, elections occur in the quantum realm, where time is an artificial construct. In LA, the ballots are not just still being counted, they are still coming in.

Paul Mitchell, a Democrat ‘political data expert’ quoted by the Times, explained that Spencer Pratt was “undone by the voters who were holding their ballots, waiting for the last shoe to drop.” This is perfectly normal. It happens all the time. In fact, most voters hold their ballots and wait. For shoes. I mean, for strategy. It’s science.

Here’s a chart some X commenter prepared showing post-election ballot receipts and how they affected the race— after the race:

President Trump called California a “3rd World Nation” with “Rigged Elections!” Last night, Vice President Vance told Fox’s Jesse Waters that the election was “sketchy.” Social media is swimming in hot takes and outraged theories.

On the other hand, and for balance, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton appeared on CNN yesterday and said that his campaign has been watching, with lawyers standing by, but has “seen nothing” suggesting any serious problems with ballot handling.

CLIP: Republican Steve Hilton says he hasn’t seen anything actionable yet (3:54).

Some claim that large numbers of Republican ballots were rejected for so-called “signature mismatches.” Others surmise that Democrats held back large numbers of fake homeless ballots till they saw the election-day results. Still others point out that California lets people who claim they are homeless to use empty lots as official addresses, and lets people register to vote using a gym membership card as ID.

Obviously, nobody knows anything for sure except that dark horse candidate Nithya Raman Noodle —who entered the race at the last minute, had an abysmal performance in a single debate, has no visible bloc of support, no yard signs or bumper stickers, no rallies, and did virtually no campaigning— experienced a thrilling come-from-behind turnaround that not only defies political gravity and basic arithmetic, but surprised even Raman, and which will guarantee incumbent mayor Karen Bass’s re-election.

Democrats and corporate media outlets like the Times insist this kind of thing happens all the time, since mail-in ballots “always skew Democrat.” Why? Who knows! It doesn’t matter! Being a Democrat just means you are better organized than Republicans, or something. It is just “a thing” and we must all accept it without question, right up there with “two weeks to flatten the curve” and “inflation is transitory.”

When you dig deeper, you discover experts who argue mail-in ballots “skew” Democrat because of pandemic policy, since liberal authorities encouraged voters to use remote options, whereas Trump called mail-in balloting ripe for fraud. Since more Democrats are now germaphobes, the theory goes, mail-in ballots track that ratio. And in the LA mayoral election, it was allegedly progressive Democrats in particular who favored mail-in ballots to avoid germs.

But that is at best a partial story. It does almost no work to explain why the decisive tranche is not just mail, but late mail. The “Democrats are more germaphobic, so they vote by mail” trope can plausibly explain typedifferences (mail vs in-person) in 2020 and maybe some persistence after. But it cannot, by itself, explain why so many Democratic-heavy ballots are returned in the last couple of days and processed in a way that they show up days after the in-person tallies.

In other words, a sincerely germaphobic Raman voter could just as well mail their ballot the first day it arrives; nothing about the pandemic-preference narrative implies a conscious strategy of “I will wait until the last possible moment so my ballot is among the final ones counted.”

📉 I’ll return to the fraud problem in a minute, but the truth is, Spencer Pratt was always a long shot. He is a political novice who’s never won an office and running as a Republican. The last time a Republican won the LA mayor’s office was Richard Riordan in 1993— and decades of bad immigration policy have flowed through LA’s septic system since then.

And not only is the race in California, the mail-in balloting capital of the world, but it is in LA, which is the nation’s autism and Medicare fraud capital. Many people think LA is also the capital of voting fraud, and probably every other kind, including but not limited to stealing lollipops from toddlers.

This will sound deeply unfair, but cynically speaking, the deck was always stacked against him. Spencer never really had a chance— even though he absolutely ran a terrific, maybe perfect campaign. He probably deserves to win. He got a bunch of Democrats to cross over and vote for him with his common-sense pitch. His losing would feel profoundly unfair.

But to say we expected him to win until it was stolen from us is a stretch.

Put differently, the outrage over Spencer’s stolen election is not about loss.Meaning, we haven’t lost something that we ever thought we had. We are just seeing another, glaringly obvious example of a problem we already knew we had. Paradoxically, that’s also the best thing about it.

Spencer Pratt should keep fighting. The voting hasn’t finished. There are weeks to go! And he should sue them whenever it has. That’s all well and good.

But all the social media outrage over the statistically impossible rise of Nithya Raman is accomplishing something even more important than deciding who will be LA’s next mayor. It is creating a permission structure for mail-in balloting reform. That permission structure is about to become very important.

📉 We’ve all been frustrated by the defections of a handful of squishy Republican senators and the languishing SAVE America Act, which, if passed, would require legitimate ID to vote in federal elections (though not in purely state or local races, such as a town’s mayor).

But the Trump Team never relies on one plan. That’s one way TAW works. It always seems to have plans A, then B, C, and D. And maybe even E. I’ll give you two great examples.

The Save Act is only one plan. Another is that the Supreme Court is expected to announce a decision any day in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a Mississippi case about whether the Constitution permits ballots received after election day to be counted, regardless of when they were postmarked. If SCOTUS issues its opinion late this month as expected, it will land just in time to affect the midterm elections.

A ruling for the RNC would effectively outlaw the whole “late-arriving ballot tranche” in federal elections in 14 states and D.C. This would effectively end the possibility of cheating by waiting for election day to see how many votes you need to win, and then magically producing them after the in-person voting has finished.

But that’s not all. There’s also Trump’s postal plan.

In late March, President Trump signed an executive order directing USPS to create rules that, among other things, require states to mail ballots only in barcoded “Official Election Mail” envelopes and to give the Postal Service voter-by-voter lists for anyone who will vote by mail in federal elections. In other words, it will modernize the free-for-all ballot process and give voters a way to track their ballots online, just like they can track their DoorDash delivery of a McDonald’s Blueberry Cake Freeze to their front door.

It’s about transparency. For the first time in history, Trump’s postal plan means Republican voters can see exactly which dumpster their ballots were thrown into. We can see where all the brand-new Democrat ballots came from. It will be possible to do kinds of statistical analysis that have always been impossible. It will put mailed ballots under an AI-powered microscope.

Of course, activist groups and Democrats sued. They argued this commonsense upgrade would be unconstitutional under the Elections Clause and various federal statutes, and asked courts for preliminary injunctions to freeze the order while litigation proceeds.

About two weeks ago, on May 28th, a federal judge in DC denied the activists’ request for an injunction, meaning the plan could move forward while the case was fully litigated. As I have explained before, when a judge denies an injunction, he must find that it is unlikely to prevail on the merits in the bigger case.

The day after that ruling, USPS published proposed rules that would, among other things, require states to give the Postal Service voter lists that states have so far resisted handing over, require associated mail-ballot barcodes, and would give the federal government unprecedented new abilities to track and even potentially halt ballot mail flows.

DHS is already exploring using the new USPS data to “monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

And so we see the two toothy prongs of a red-hot pincer. On one side, SCOTUS appears poised to end the counting of late-arriving mail-in ballots. Democrats can still use mail-in ballots, but they’ll have to send them in early, or at least on time. But I’ll bet you a taco truck that all the “shoe dropping” fun will have drained out.

The second claw is the new USPS rules. Once ballots can be tracked and analyzed, and once the feds get hold of and audit absentee voter lists, a wide variety of clever possibilities will evaporate like the morning dew off the mail truck. Between the two prongs, even if there was no fraud to start with (don’t make me laugh), voters can enjoy a new level of confidence in elections.

Even if it accomplishes nothing else, Spencer Pratt’s hard work and lopsided result does this: his vivid example prepares the narrative battlefield for Plans B (SCOTUS) and C (USPS) to more easily survive challenges and take effect soon.

I am not saying that Plan A (requiring ID) has become irrelevant. But Plan A is much less urgent once Plans B and C come online. After all, SAVE America-style ID requirements mainly affect in-person voting, not post-election absentee fraud, which is clearly the bigger problem.

In other words, once SCOTUS slams the door on late federal ballots and USPS forensically logs who gets which ballot and when, ID shifts from an existential fight to an important but secondary electoral hygiene. And with all those germs out there, we need to be hygienic.

The glass-half-full view of Spencer Pratt’s sacrifice in Los Angeles is that he just created the best possible example for why both SCOTUS’s decision and USPS’s plans are fair, reasonable, and necessary. TAW.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Catch the mail truck back here tomorrow morning, for another installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.