LOS ANGELES — To the surprise of few, President Donald Trump has once again claimed without evidence that Democrats are somehow cheating to win California’s primary elections — writing on social media late Wednesday that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are investigating the matter.

“The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” Trump posted to his social media website.

“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles,” he wrote in a second post. “Why the vote counting DELAY???”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles — run by Trump loyalist First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — declined to comment Thursday morning on Trump’s claims of an investigation.

The White House declined to say what Trump was basing his cheating claims on, if anything, or provide details about the inquiry. Trump also provided no proof when he doubled down on his claims at a Thursday event in the Oval Office, where he alleged that California Democrats had “found a lot of mail-in ballots” the night before and were “rigging the election” with them.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber defended the state’s election process in a statement, saying “accuracy comes before speed” when counting millions of ballots in the nation’s most populous state.

“Taking the time to do this work correctly protects voters’ rights and ensures the integrity of our elections,” Weber said. “California has built a strong system that expands access, empowers voters, and ensures more Californians can fully participate in our democracy.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office responded directly to Trump late Wednesday with its own social media post, writing, “Trump is lying about California again — time to take the phone away from grandpa and put him to sleep.”

On Thursday morning, Newsom’s office wrote that there “is a lot of misinformation floating around about California’s election — including from the President,” and recommended people watch a CNN video about California’s election process. It concluded that delays in vote counting in the state are essentially a result of state leaders deciding that providing voters with “last minute options” for casting ballots is more important than a quick count.

“And yes, for the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Newsom’s office wrote.

In an email, Brandon Richards, Newsom’s deputy director for rapid response, said Trump’s claims are part of “a tinfoil hat level conspiracy theory that has been debunked repeatedly.”

Trump’s latest remarks came as additional vote counting on Wednesday narrowed the advantage of Republican Steve Hilton over his Democratic challengers in the California governor’s race and closed the gap in the L.A. mayoral race between the MAGA-aligned candidate Spencer Pratt, currently running second, and City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running third.

Hilton on Thursday maintained his slight lead over Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general and Health and Human Services secretary in the Biden administration, while billionaire progressive Tom Steyer trailed in third place. In the mayoral race, Pratt remained in a fight with Raman for a second place finish and a chance to challenge Mayor Karen Bass in November.

Neither Hilton nor Pratt responded to a request for comment. In a recent interview on “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, Hilton said the state’s slow vote counting was “why so many people don’t believe the results” and a product of California’s “corrupt Democrat machine” being in power for too long.

Even before voting day, election experts and Democratic leaders had predicted Trump would make claims of cheating, which they dismissed as more baseless bluster from a president beset by low approval ratings.

Those same experts and Democratic leaders acknowledge that California’s system for counting votes takes a long time and should be quickened, but emphasize that it is not because of anything nefarious. Rather, it is because California allows voters to cast ballots by mail up until election day — and then has to count those ballots, which can number in the millions and are subject to manual signature verification.

Trump has long dismissed such explanations. An election denier since he first entered politics more than a decade ago, he has pushed skepticism about his and his party’s electoral losses time and again — most notably when he claimed, again without evidence, that the 2020 presidential race he lost to Joe Biden was stolen.

He has combined his tactic of targeting undocumented immigrants for political gain with his skepticism of election integrity by claiming, again without evidence, that such immigrants somehow vote in large numbers, particularly in large blue states such as California, despite experts saying there is no evidence of that.

The president has alleged that mail ballots — such as those used by the majority of California voters — are a particularly rich source of voter fraud, despite again having no basis for the claim and it being disputed by experts.

And, he has tried to use the power of his administration to make sweeping changes to election laws to bar mail ballots and require strict voter ID and proof of citizenship measures, despite the control of elections and their rules being constitutionally given to the states.

Those efforts have prompted a wave of litigation between the Trump administration and California and other blue states, with multiple cases pending in the courts over voter ID, proof of citizenship, mail balloting and the role that the U.S. Postal Service may be allowed to play in processing such ballots.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office has been spearheading those legal fights for the state, on Thursday blasted Trump’s latest allegations of cheating as false and more of the same from a president with a history of lying about elections — such as when he falsely claimed last week that California has no voting booths, only mail ballots.

“Here’s the truth: In California, we believe that every vote should be counted, and that’s what’s happening right now,” Bonta said.

That Democratic candidates might gain on Republicans as later mail ballots are counted was also anticipated.

Elections experts warned before vote counting began of the potential for a “red mirage,” wherein earlier voting among Republicans and late voting among Democrats — many of whom were unsure of whom to vote for in the two high-profile races — would create an early illusion of Republican victories despite large volumes of liberal votes from major population centers still to be counted.

It is a trend that has played out repeatedly in past elections, and one that does not come as a surprise to careful election watchers.

Some local election officials made a point of preparing their staffs for baseless claims of election fraud in advance of this year’s primaries. State officials made repeated efforts to explain why California elections take time, precisely to undercut claims amid counting that the delays were the result of fraud.

Just last month, Newsom sent a letter to local election officials in California saying that they “must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads,” and noting steps Democrats have taken to speed things up — including passing laws last year allowing mail ballots to be processed further in advance of election day, shortening the time frame within which ballots must be counted after election day and requiring more regular updates for the public.

“We face an assault on our democratic values unlike anything we have ever seen in our lifetimes, and it’s our job to safeguard those values during these unprecedented times,” Newsom wrote.

Attacks on California’s voting system have come regardless, and not just from Trump.

Above an X post Wednesday suggesting Pratt was losing ground to Raman as more counts came in, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote, “California keeps dumping votes. Odds are shifting because the vote dumps always seem to go one way. Count until you get the result you want?”

Above another X post noting that the California count would take time, Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official and conservative podcaster married to Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller, wrote, “The Democrats are about to steal the LA mayoral race once again using mail-in voting.”

Both of the posts that DeSantis and Miller were responding to were from Polymarket, a prediction market where people can bet on the outcomes of political races, pop culture events and a slew of other topics.

Such emerging financial markets, which process billions of dollars in bets, are causing rising concerns about political meddling for profit — including by campaign staffers and other individuals with insider knowledge of polling and other campaign information, or by politicians and their operatives, whose public remarks about politics can swing those markets.

Registered voters in California — where the electorate skews heavily Democratic — generally trust local election officials to conduct fair and secure elections, expressing confidence in them by a 2-to-1 margin overall in a recent poll by the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. However, that shifts dramatically along partisan lines — with 79% of Democratic voters, 62% of independents and just 42% of Republicans expressing confidence, the poll found.

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who studies elections and was a senior policy adviser on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said Trump’s latest remarks were “disappointing” and false — but hardly surprising.

“The one constant is that he will claim that elections are rigged, even when there is absolutely no proof that is the case,” Levitt said. “He’s degrading a process that is worthy of respect and admiration, and worthy of our confidence.”

(Times staff writer Ana Ceballos in Washington contributed to this report.)

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