Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times,

Most respondents said having children is important to a fulfilling life, while citing faith, family values, and economic stability as key factors.

The question of the declining birth rate in the United States has been weighing on many, including economists and those in the religious sector.

As more Americans reach the age of qualification for Social Security, the question of how to meet that demand alone has caused some to question what the future holds if American birthrates continue their current downward trajectory.

The current American fertility rate is roughly 1.6 children per woman.

A poll of Epoch Times readers found most believe that children are important, and also that the nation should look for ways to support family growth.

Importance Of Family

With a national average of less than two children per woman, readers were asked how they feel about family size.

A large majority of those polled, 87 percent, believe that having children is important to having a fulfilling life.

To add to that, 71 percent are concerned about the declining birth rates in developed countries across the world, but 63 percent agree that the belief that future generations will be worse off discourages people from having children.

When asked about the ideal number of children for a family, 35 percent of respondents said three children, 33 percent said four or more children, and 31 percent said two children.

When readers were asked how many children they either have, or ideally would like to have, 35 percent of respondents said four or more children.

Another 29 percent selected two children, and 27 percent selected three. Five percent said they would ideally have no children, while 3 percent preferred one child.

Religion And Values

According to Epoch Times readers, religion and values play a huge role in the decision to grow a family.

A whopping 83 percent of readers believe that declining religious faith contributes to declining birth rates. Even more, 89 percent, think that the decline of traditional marriage contributes to declining birth rates.

However, outside factors are also thought to be a major consideration. Fifty-seven percent of those polled think that the lack of support for parenthood discourages people from having children.

When asked, 83 percent of readers agree that a sense of purpose and meaning in life encourages people to have children.

The same percentage believes that modern feminism has contributed to declining birth rates, and even more, 89 percent, think that a national decline in family values contributes to a corresponding decline in birth rates.

One reader said, “A return to traditional values in the home and in the educational system is what I believe we need.”

Other Influences

Practical struggles are also a factor contributing to adults’ unwillingness to grow their families.

Sixty-one percent of those polled believe that economic uncertainty discourages people from having children.

Currently, 56 percent of readers agree that housing costs discourage people from having children, and 61 percent believe that costs associated with childcare and education discourage people from having children.

In a related question, 78 percent of readers believe that career priorities play a role in discouraging people from having children.

However, almost three-quarters of those asked, 74 percent, also think that social media and digital entertainment reduce interest in the formation of families.

A reader commented that “Economic relief from the massive fraud, which has caused the tax rate to explode,” could be one solution to the issue of the declining birth rates. “This allows people to take less money home.”

Addressing The Challenge

Those who believe there is a problem with how many children Americans are having also offered suggestions on what would be the most effective way to encourage family growth.

The largest group of respondents, 46 percent, said they believe renewed religious and spiritual values would have the most impact on Americans’ likelihood of having more children.

Another 16 percent think that a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in life would encourage family growth, and 13 percent think that economic security would move the needle.

A combined 13 percent of readers credited either greater support for parenthood, lower costs in raising children, and more affordable housing would be the most effective way to change people’s minds.

When asked to write in what they believed is most important, many made comments supporting things like “safety for the future,” “strong marriages,” and more “value and support of motherhood” as possible cures for the issue.

One respondent pointed to a possible systemic problem, saying, “A society that is not wrapped up in itself [becomes] less me-oriented.”

The Epoch Times conducted this reader survey on June 3-4, 2026, by email and social media, generating 1,277 responses.

Authored by Haley Zaremba via Oilprice.com,

• Biglaw firm Duane Morris argues the energy sector’s greatest AI-related risk is not surging power demand but failing to adopt AI tools fast enough to remain competitive.

• MIT research challenges industry claims that AI efficiency gains will offset its enormous energy consumption, while new data centers continue to be approved at record pace.

• AI shows genuine promise in clean energy applications – from nuclear fusion modeling to EV battery recovery – but the AI investment boom is simultaneously diverting capital away from next-gen energy research.

The artificial intelligence boom has created unprecedented pressure and anxiety in the energy industry. The public and private sector alike are expending enormous amounts of effort trying to quantify the amount of electricity that will be needed to power data centers in the near future, and get ahead of the skyrocketing energy demands headed for our already outdated and beleaguered electric grids. But the answer to the energy monster that AI is unleashing could very well lie in the application of AI tools.

A new article published by Biglaw firm Duane Morris argues that the most prescient AI-related risk for the energy industry is not the one posed by the demands of the sector itself, but the risk of falling behind in AI integration and application. The firm argues that the energy sector has an obligation to consider the ways in which large language models can be an asset, concluding that “AI should not be viewed only through the lens of risk avoidance.”

“The risks of AI remain real and must be governed thoughtfully,” the Energy Intelligence article goes on to say. “But in a sector responsible for critical infrastructure, the greater long-term risk may not be using AI too aggressively – it may be failing to use it enough.”

Indeed, proponents of AI adoption argue that although training and operating large language models eats up an enormous amount of energy, not to mention other finite resources such as water, AI will be instrumental in making a wide array of industries significantly more energy-efficient. In fact, through these widespread efficiencies, some experts say that AI has the potential to save more energy than it consumes overall.

However, critics say that these claims are overblown and the result of wishful thinking rather than rigorous modelling. A 2025 report from MIT challenges such claims, pointing out that touted efficiency gains have not yet come to fruition, and may not be forthcoming. And while numbers on AI’s efficiency gains – and even the amount of energy that AI is currently using – are still lacking, new data centers are being greenlit at lightning speed.

“AI’s integration into almost everything from customer service calls to algorithmic ‘bosses’ to warfare is fueling enormous demand,” the Washington Post wrote in an article published last summer. “Despite dramatic efficiency improvements, pouring those gains back into bigger, hungrier models powered by fossil fuels will create the energy monster we imagine.”

Moreover, it is just this fear of “being left behind” that’s fuelling the AI boom, arguably even more than actual demand. There is question as to whether rapid AI integration into everything from our energy grids to our electric toothbrushes – no, really – is going to create a more sophisticated and energy-efficient world, or whether it’s just a resource-intensive bid to stay relevant in a rapidly changing global economy.

Wherever you stand on the issue of AI integration, it’s increasingly clear that AI has some extremely promising applications in next-gen clean energy technologies. Researchers are using large language models to conduct “needle in a haystack” type inquiries to find the best methods and materials to advance nuclear fusion modelling, for example. In the renewable energy sector, AI is being used to improve forecasting of energy supply and demand for greater grid stability. And AI could even soon be used to give new life to dead EV batteries.

The massive energy needs of AI are also pushing increasing and intensified research efforts into cutting edge clean energy technologies such as nuclear fusion, advanced geothermal, and space-based solar power. But Big Tech is running on natural gas while it powers research into these clean energy ambitions. And, overall, research into next-gen energy is suffering from the AI gold rush as investors redirect their attention.

AI’s role in the energy sector is anything but simple. And it’s true that avoiding AI integration entirely won’t solve the problem. But if the energy sector is going to eschew risk aversion and lean into the AI boom as Duane Morris suggests, it needs to have a strong policy foundation and a much smarter AI strategy going forward.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

Authored by Dr R P via The Daily Sceptic,

Never mind Fancy Bear, or the NSO Group, the biggest threat to the open internet today is from the Big Tech corporations on which it has come to depend. For what else are we to conclude given that Google appears to be working on a system to lock large parts of the internet behind a new form of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) designed not to tell apart humans from bots, but instead to make an un-person of anyone who doesn’t own an ‘approved’ Android or Apple device.

Google’s reCAPTCHA service is used by a wide variety of websites, many of them independent of Google in every other regard, to limit incoming traffic or data entered into contact forms. It is intended to prevent automated software from accessing these resources and using them to send spam messages or flood websites with denial of service attacks. You have probably encountered it when told to identify all the bicycles in a grid of images.

Under the auspices of its Cloud Fraud Defence programme, Google is introducing a new form of CAPTCHA for which the way to ‘prove’ one is a human is to be in possession of a Google-approved device. Reclaim the Net’s original reporting focused on the threat to deGoogled phones, meaning phones running Android-like operating systems which have Google’s – often unwelcome – proprietary features removed, such as GrapheneOS or LineageOS.

However, just as the dull name of ‘age verification’ serves as a cloak beneath which schemes to end all truly personal computing can be smuggled, the danger here could be much broader than the technically focused headline implies. As the sources discussing this are relatively few, it is hard to ascertain exactly what has already been rolled out and what is still in the conceptual stages. But it appears that the new style of CAPTCHA threatens not just users with deGoogled phones but anyone without an ‘approved’ device.

Google’s own documentation confirms the existence – as a “Preview” in limited use with alternative options presently existing – of CAPTCHAs which require an Apple or Android handset to pass them. But it describes this in a “Mobile Verification” context, which may imply a more limited use than reCAPTCHA in general. However, with such functionality possible, there is no reason that Google could not activate this, without alternative options, everywhere that its reCAPTCHA-branded prompts appear.

Knowing that locking out everyone except Android users would have even the most clueless politicians smelling a monopoly, Google has deigned to also allow Apple iOS users through, but their approval is nonetheless limited to devices where the full tech stack is under corporate control. Apple phones and tablets use a locked bootloader to trap users within a walled garden, where they are at Apple’s mercy whenever an unwelcome new feature is introduced. Unless the Keep Android Open campaign succeeds, certified Android devices will soon be scarcely better, a condition of certification being that manufacturers must obstruct users from side-loading to install apps from outside Google’s Play Store.

Because Apple and Android phones do not respect your freedom, Google chooses to trust them. That’s an odd-sounding sentence, so let me explain.

On a Linux desktop, or a GrapheneOS phone, you, the user, have true control of your own property and can modify its operation to suit your own ends. And whilst Microsoft Windows has definitely not been respecting your freedom recently, Windows users still have control over what extra programs they install on a Windows system, for now. But on an Apple or Android device Google can be confident that it is precisely as enshittified as Big Tech intended it to be. It can be sure that any programs running on the device were programs which it approved within its own app stores, and that the device will never prioritise the needs of the user when they conflict with the desires of the corporate master.

Hardware attestation – where your device, via a cryptographic process, provides proof to a remote server that its hardware and software are genuine and unmodified – intensifies this imbalance even further. Not only can the device keep tabs on you, but it can also use a cryptographic key kept within a normally-inaccessible part of the system to sign each message it sends to the centralised servers and assure them that you have not tampered with it. The server can choose to deny access to any device not able to provide the signed confirmation. In Big Tech’s dictionary, exerting true ownership over your own property is now dismissed as tampering, where anyone with the temerity to ‘tamper’ with the items they bought with their own hard-earned money is to be excluded from polite society.

Within modern certified Android devices, the Play Integrity API provides capabilities for hardware attestation. For Apple, the App Attest API performs the same function. The TPM 2.0 security chips which Microsoft decided to list as a hardware prerequisite for recent Windows versions provide the physical components which would be necessary if Microsoft seeks to introduce hardware attestation in future, its decision being made doubly suspicious by the fact that even the most security-focused Linux distributions do not make TPMs a requirement and that today’s Windows can run without a TPM in practice. This concept of ‘Trusted Computing’ does comparatively little in terms of letting you trust that your computer remains secure, but is very helpful to let remote centralised servers trust that your computer will obey their diabolical DRM schemes.

Some banking apps already use hardware attestation, having bought into Google’s argument that this improves security. Google’s argument is laughable. Their hardware attestation approves legacy stock Android models which have known unpatched vulnerabilities – including ones which would allow malware to spy on user activity – or have received no updates for years; but it blocks fully up-to-date GrapheneOS devices. In treating hardware attestation as a proxy for security, banks and other app providers are locking out the more secure devices. And for all these security hoops they expect users to jump through, services still leak sensitive records by the billion from large-scale data breaches at their end.

Coming back to CAPTCHAs specifically, whilst AI crawlers and automated spambots are a genuine problem, using hardware attestation to combat them is like using a pneumatic jackhammer to open a wine bottle when a corkscrew is already at hand. Although today’s machine learning can often identify all the squares with bicycles, there are still non-invasive methods to allow human users whilst excluding machine-generated traffic, often by adding a small cost in time or energy which is insignificant for a human user, but sums prohibitively when a spambot tries to perform thousands of actions simultaneously.

It is therefore hard to see any rationale for a hardware attestation CAPTCHA except to cement a duopoly of Apple and Android, and to break user anonymity. After-all, what good is a VPN or Tor if every interaction you make with a website at the other end is connected back to you via a CAPTCHA which queries unique, unchanging identifiers on your phone. Even if the site you visit never gets this information itself, Google would have the opportunity to process it.

Remember that this is not just a CAPTCHA wrapping around Google’s own services. Online shops and banking websites are among users of reCAPTCHA. Access to essential services could easily be denied to anyone without an ‘approved’ device. Here is a route to debanking which doesn’t even require your bank to turn on you: hardware attestation CAPTCHAs give Big Tech a unilateral veto power over anyone’s online interactions. Google-branded CAPTCHAs are in such widespread use that they might as well qualify as infrastructure, and compromised infrastructure – unlike ill-conceived laws – isn’t something from which people can unilaterally opt out.

Widespread use of hardware attested CAPTCHAs would relegate users of desktops and non-Google, non-Apple phones to second-class citizens, only able to browse the internet with an Apple or Android device to act as their chaperone. By making computing platforms which still respect user freedoms unable to browse without help from Big-Tech-approved smartphones, they could drive down demand for true general-purpose computers. Eventually all that would remain in production would be managed appliances, thin-client systems utterly dependent upon Big Tech subscriptions.

This is happening at the same time as general-purpose computing is under assault from multiple fronts including: the age-verification lobby, the targeting of developers, and sky-rocketing prices for RAM and storage due to AI companies buying up most of the global supply. Some might say that the adage “sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice” provides a possible explanation for these simultaneous threats, but their combined effect is still to take the power of true computing out of the hands of the people.

Even more terrifying is the technical possibility that hardware attestation could be used at the ISP level to obstruct freedom-respecting devices from ever connecting in the first place, leaving an internet where Big Gov and Big Tech can mandate anything without fearing competitors.

The push for hardware attestation is not new. Microsoft tried it in the early 2000s; it was rejected as “Treacherous Computing”. Google tried to push Web Environment Integrity in 2023. It would have violated the principle that a user should have true control of his or her own computer by letting websites dictate that only users with certain system configurations, such as those optimised to maximally show adverts and make tracking as easy as possible, could access content. It was cancelled after community outcry.

This time Google is using ‘salami tactics’, the earliest hints of the new smartphone-dependent reCAPTCHA appearing online in Autumn 2025 to no fanfare. This has let it evade the attention of cyber-civil-libertarians such as David Davis or Ron Wyden. The wider free speech movement has remained unaware too, but the hopes of Sarah Rogers, US free-speech tsar, to preserve the “spirit of the internet… that made so many favourable contributions to our culture and economy… where you can go to be free” will be dashed if hardware attestation becomes widespread. And this time Google has the advantage that its ‘solution’ could ride to the rescue of Digital ID and age verification initiatives, themselves a lobbied-for ‘solution’ in search of a problem.

As a free-market libertarian, one of the few legitimate purposes I can recognise for national regulators is preventing the growth of monopolies so total that they can lock out alternatives. Alas, today’s regulators seem uninterested in stopping this: Britain’s ‘OFCOMmunists’ are busy trying to ban VPNs and supplying free bedding for Preston Byrne’s hamster, while America’s FCC has tangled itself up with an absurd attempt to ban the import of network routers – something for which the USA has no domestic production lines. The EU is even worse, aiding and abetting these plans by using hardware attestation in its own Digital Identity app. Far from preventing duopolistic abuses of the market, it is harnessing them. The EU’s desire for tech stack sovereignty seems to stop where it would limit its ability to control and coerce its citizens.

The stupidity of allowing hardware attestation to spread is best exemplified by imagining what could befall the EU when – after having become societally dependent upon a Digital Identity app, itself dependent upon a Google-Apple hardware attestation layer – it subsequently does something new to offend Donald Trump. Whilst the resulting collapse would be justly deserved by the technocrats in power, the people on the ground would suffer severely.

A wise politician today would recognise the wisdom of preventing that by creating an internet which would be immune to political interference by virtue of being out of the control of Big Gov and Big Tech right down to the physical layer. He would recognise that sacrificing his own ability to manipulate that network would be more than compensated by the certainty that no geopolitical adversaries could manipulate it against him either. Today, the open-source community does not need anyone’s permission to develop a parallel internet for a parallel society, though the backing of wise politicians would be welcomed. But the platforms on which the community must initially discuss the details and share source code and schematics are still within today’s internet. Wait too long and hardware attestation could weld the escape hatch shut.

Stop Press: Google’s documentation changed during the course of writing this article, adding a highlighted box describing the new CAPTCHA as a “Preview” with alternatives available. Google clearly knows the plans aren’t popular. If enough public attention can be brought to bear against them, they may stay at the preview stage forever.

Dr R P completed a robotics PhD during the global over-reaction to Covid. He spends his time with one eye on an oscilloscope, one hand on a soldering iron and one ear waiting for the latest bad news. He has signed the Together Pledge and will never rely upon Apple, government or Google ‘approved’ devices.

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

The Department of War has formally removed 180 faiths from its official list of religious affiliation codes, leaving 31 remaining, according to a memo posted by Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell on June 5.

The military had initially listed 211 faith and belief codes, but that number has been sharply reduced under the direction of War Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to a memo signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, dated May 20.

The memo states that the change was intended to “streamline the DoW [Department of War] collection of religious preferences selection for Service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.”

“The new ‘Religious Affiliation Codes’ list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of Service members and to provide religious support activities that align with Service members’ personal faith and practices,” the memo reads.

The updated list includes agnosticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and a range of Christian denominations such as Baptist, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran, and Seventh Day Adventist. Options of “no religion” or “other religion” are listed as well.

Parnell said that the cut in religious affiliation codes was not meant to make any judgment about the legitimacy of any faith or belief system, nor to serve as a list of “‘officially approved’ religions.”

“Rather, it is designed to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups,” he said in a post on X.

Parnell emphasized that the Pentagon remains committed to upholding service members’ First Amendment rights and protecting their rights to the free exercise of religion.

“Chaplains play an instrumental role in providing spiritual care and facilitating the warfighters’ ability to freely exercise their religion of choice, or no religion at all. With this new change, we believe we can provide the best data to support our chaplains in that effort,” he said.

Hegseth first announced the planned reduction in March, saying that the previous system was “impractical” and that “many codes were never used at all.” He noted that the vast majority of military personnel used only six of the religious affiliation codes.

“The previous system had ballooned to well over 200 faith codes,” the Pentagon chief said in a video address posted on March 24.

“Our internal review committee recommended that going forward the department use 31 religious affiliation codes. This brings the codes in line with its original purpose – giving chaplains clear, usable information so they can minister the service members in a way that aligns with that service member’s faith background and religious practice.”

Update (2200ET): In a stunning shift, 9 days after the actual election day, LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman has suddenly overtaken former reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary race on Sunday, the latest election results show.

“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” – Stalin https://t.co/G3iT14i3gI pic.twitter.com/hwRJP8kmff

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 8, 2026

With 83.2% of the expected vote in, Democratic incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, who NBC News projected on election night will advance to the November runoff, maintained her lead with 250,871 votes, or 34.68%, according to the updated vote tally released by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk on Sunday afternoon. Raman has 27.12% of the ballots counted so far, surpassing Pratt, who has 26.69%. She is now ahead of him by 3,113 votes.

Although no news outlet has projected which candidate will face Bass in November, Bass’ campaign released a statement following Sunday’s drop, referring to Raman as the mayor’s “general election opponent.”

Spencer Pratt took to social media:

“A net swing of more than 43,000 votes since Tuesday..”

43,000, huh? Where have I seen that number before…?

Probably nothing. 🤷 https://t.co/W2E3k6PHyR pic.twitter.com/ZfzHCy9enb

— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) June 8, 2026

This post on X summed up the general farce well…

“How did a blue city only increase votes for Nithya by mail, without increasing votes for Karen Bass? This is fraud”

Don’t forget, “democracy” itself is at stake here…

Remember everyone…we are still in the lead, and we’ve got allllllll the way til July 6th to keep counting. They’re not the only ones who know where to find votes 😉 pic.twitter.com/rqgIcwUtGZ

— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) June 7, 2026

What a fucking joke!!!

*  *  *

Spencer Pratt entered election night with momentum, a measurable polling advantage, and what looked like a path to one of the two runoff spots in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Days later, the outcome is still unknown, and Pratt’s path to the runoff is narrowing fast. Late-arriving mail-in ballots have methodically eroded his margin over Nithya Raman, and the trajectory has prompted pointed questions about how California counts its votes and who benefits when the process drags on for weeks.

California’s jungle primary structure allows two candidates from the same party to advance to the general election, and it is widely believed that Democrats intentionally designed this system to ensure Republicans would be shut out of general elections. If Raman overtakes Pratt, the November ballot will feature two Democrats, freezing out the candidate who ran as the race’s most prominent outsider voice on crime and homelessness in a city that has become a symbol of both.

As of the latest available count, Pratt’s lead over Raman sits at just over 7,000 votes, a margin of under one percent, with roughly 22 percent of ballots still waiting to be counted. Pre-election polls had Pratt leading Raman by three to four points, and the expectation was that he would advance to the November runoff.

The gap between those projections and the current count grows harder to square with each new ballot drop. In the most recent batch, Raman pulled approximately 40 percent of the vote, compared with Pratt’s 18 percent. Even Democratic incumbent Karen Bass, the race’s front-runner, captured only 33 percent of that same drop. The remaining candidates split what was left.

The slow-rolling count and the bizarre trend of Raman getting the lead over all candidates in the mail-in vote have drawn national attention.

And former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom. “The question to the rest of the world is what happened to California elections? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s Gavin Newsom,” McCarthy said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures. “When Gavin Newsom was elected governor of California, you knew who was elected in a day to two days. Now it takes more than weeks, almost a month.”

He continued, “Gavin changed a number of election laws in which you want to see is what did he do and why did he cause it?” He went further on the structural shifts that preceded the current chaos. “We had cut off voter registration 30 days before the election. That helps the registrars to know who’s going to vote and the candidates. Now we have same day voter, and you don’t have to show ID. Gavin changed the rules where he mails ballots to everyone. So he took away the choice to Californians to vote in person or to vote absentee. Everybody gets mailed a ballot. But he didn’t clean up the rolls. So that raises doubt in people’s minds.”

That doubt has found a louder audience online. Robby Starbuck posted a breakdown on X that laid out the ballot-drop pattern in stark visual terms.

Spencer Pratt is likely going to be overtaken by far left Nithya Raman today. This graph shows the count on Election Day through last night.

Nithya did this by suddenly winning 1st in every new ballot drop.

North Korean “elections” have more self respect. Even they’d find it absurd for 3rd to suddenly jump to 1st place in every ballot drop DAYS after an election. It’s just ludicrous. pic.twitter.com/fL0nU5k8Ma

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 7, 2026

Starbuck followed that with another post on Sunday morning that demonstrates just how unlikely it is that Raman would be performing so well in the mail-in ballots.

ChatGPT can’t find a single example of a 3rd place candidate surging, days AFTER Election Day, to overtake 2nd place.

It couldn’t find 1 example in all of American history. That’s what’s happening with Nithya Raman & Spencer Pratt.

Los Angeles has 3rd world country elections.

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 7, 2026

Mail-ins arriving before Election Day:

Bass: 38.1%
Pratt: 27.9%
Raman: 20%

Mail-ins arriving after Election Day:

Raman: 37% (+17% surge)

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 7, 2026

Elon Musk entered the conversation by pointing to what he sees as the underlying mechanism. “The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud,” Musk wrote on X, replying to Starbuck’s post. “When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized.“

Voters watched Pratt finish a solid second in the polls and on election night, then saw that lead steadily shrink as waves of late-arriving ballots were added to the count. When a state with California’s resources still can’t produce timely, transparent results in one of the nation’s most closely watched elections, skepticism is inevitable.

If Pratt ultimately loses a runoff spot, it will become yet another flashpoint in the growing national debate over whether Americans can trust how elections are conducted and counted.