Spencer Pratt, the reality television personality running as a Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor, posted a meme over the weekend suggesting that he couldn't understand how votes get counted in the city — and the internet was happy to explain it to him.
Pratt posted a photo of a man staring at a chalkboard covered in complex equations, captioning it: "Me trying to figure out how votes get counted in LA."
The replies were not sympathetic.
Rep. Ted Lieu, the California Democrat, went straight to the math. "Dear Republican Spencer Pratt: Before you spew conspiracy theories, here are some numbers for you in LA," he wrote, listing the approximate number of registered Democrats in the city — 1,224,737 — against the approximate number of registered Republicans — 326,292. "This is why you won't make the top two. #math #occamsrazor."
Journalist Mehdi Hasan, former host at MSNBC and founder of Zeteo, kept it shorter: "Which is why you have no business running for mayor of LA in the first place."
Political commentator Tahra Hoops connected the complaint directly to the job Pratt is seeking. "If this is hard for you to understand maybe you should not be in charge of a 15 billion dollar city budget."
Writer Cody Johnston dispensed with diplomacy entirely: "Some dumba-- doesn't understand s---, wow!!!"
Pratt's post is consistent with a broader pattern of election skepticism circulating in MAGA circles around the LA race. As Raw Story reported Saturday, Rasmussen Reports recently promoted a claim that a ballot drop had produced zero votes for Pratt — a claim that was debunked using actual batch composition data showing Pratt received votes in every single drop.