Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman literally wept on election night as she conceded the mayoral race to Spencer Pratt. Then California's legendary vote-counting machine did what California's legendary vote-counting machine does, and by morning she was in the lead. Tears to cheers — no explanation required.

You can't write this stuff. Actually, you can, because it's California, and this is just how they do elections now.

Nine days after voters cast their ballots, the race is still being "counted" — and Raman has clawed ahead of former reality TV star Pratt by just over 3,000 votes. Incumbent Democrat Karen Bass leads the pack with approximately 34 percent, while Raman and Pratt sit neck and neck around 27 percent each, fighting for the second runoff slot. Barely more than 80 percent of votes have been tallied.

So how did Raman pull off this Lazarus act? Simple. She secured 40 percent of the latest ballot batch. The ballots that arrived after election night — the ones nobody saw coming — just happened to break overwhelmingly for the Democrat.

Shocking. Truly.

Pratt isn't buying what California is selling. He posted, "Remember everyone…we are still in the lead, and we've got allllllll the way til July 6th to keep counting." That drawn-out "allllllll" tells you everything about how Republicans feel watching this slow-motion heist unfold.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put a finer point on it, noting that Californians "used to know their election winners within days" but under Governor Gavin Newsom's changes, results "drag on for weeks, sometimes longer." That's not a bug — that's the feature. The longer you count, the more creative you can get.

Elon Musk weighed in too, describing the combination of banning voter ID while pushing universal mail-in voting as something that "effectively legalizes large-scale fraud." Strong words, but when you watch a woman concede in tears on live television and then take the lead 48 hours later without a single credible explanation, "fraud" starts to feel like the polite word for it.

The November runoff between Bass and whoever survives this farce is still months away. But the damage is already done. Every Republican voter in California just watched their candidate's election-night victory get slowly erased by ballots that materialized days later, counted at a pace that would embarrass a DMV clerk.

This is the state that wants to lecture the rest of America on democracy. The state that can't deliver electricity in a heat wave or keep needles off the sidewalks in San Francisco now wants us to trust that these late-arriving ballots are totally legitimate, per Lifezette's reporting.

Nithya Raman cried when she lost. We're starting to understand how she felt.