It's Tuesday again, which means another round of primaries is happening. Maine's Senate primary will probably be the most-watched of the night, as everyone is waiting to see how Graham Platner does after facing new controversies last week, but there will also be primaries in Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina to watch as well.

However, the primary that has been generating the most news for the past week has been California's. After the polling places closed last Tuesday night in the Golden State, the counting began. It's still ongoing. After a full week of counting (as of this writing), only 84 percent of the ballots have been counted. This has left several races still up in the air, and has also resulted in at least one high-profile switch in the standings that were reported on the night of the election.

The biggest uncalled race is for the governor's office. One winner has been proclaimed, but the second slot is still an open question. In California, the candidates who wind up in first and second place after the votes are all counted will both advance to the general election. So far, Democrat Xavier Becerra has secured one of these slots. As of this writing, Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Tom Steyer are still fighting for the second-place position (Hilton had initially led the standings outright, but Becerra passed him after a few days). Hilton has moved from being around 350,000 votes ahead of Steyer to now leading him only by roughly 210,000 votes. That's a pretty big shift, but it may not be enough -- there may just not be enough outstanding ballots for Steyer to make up the remaining ground. It's an open question, which is why the second spot in the race has yet to be called.

Down in Los Angeles, there was a big shift in position. With 92 percent of the vote counted, news organizations have called the race for two Democrats -- incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, and challenger Nithya Raman. Left out in the cold (by around 22,000 votes out of more than 800,000 cast) was Republican Spencer Pratt, who initially had been in second place in the early count.

This all has -- quite predictably -- given rise to accusations of "rigging" the election by disgruntled Republicans, from Donald Trump on down. According to Trump, of course, any election in which any Democrat beats any Republican is, by definition (in his mind, at least) "rigged." But this has now taken a more ominous turn, as a member of the Justice Department is now announcing upcoming -- and completely unspecified -- election fraud charges, while presenting not a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing.

Here are the words of First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli, during a recent interview:

It will be election fraud charges in the next, I hate to put timelines on things, one to two months, I believe. We need some of these results to be certified so we can prove some of the allegations. But we will be charging some people.

When asked if he was confident he had enough evidence to bring charges, here's what he had to say:

I can't get into [it] too much but just know that at this point, right now, we are wide open for investigations. If anyone knows anything -- please, direct evidence. I know people have theories and they have ideas and... what we need now are witnesses.

Here are the words of the Red Queen, from Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, for comparison: "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards." This is just before she screams: "Off with her head!" at Alice, of course.

Sorry for descending into surreal parody there, but it somehow seemed like the only appropriate response.

Donald Trump has been screaming "Rigged!" at every election result he didn't like, all the way back to the primaries he lost in 2016. He has never shown one thin shred of evidence for any of it, though. He still makes delusional statements about how he really won "all 50 states" and other such patent nonsense, on a regular basis. But the one time his followers really tried hard to prove Trump's delusions were real -- in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election -- they were laughed right out of court in over five dozen cases. Because they simply had no evidence of any "election-rigging," other than conspiracy theories and Trump's delusional belief that no Democrat could possibly win any election anywhere -- most especially when he was on the ballot.

So let's get back to reality, shall we? This is a reality that California officials have been patiently explaining for the past week. Yes, the state is slow in counting ballots. And yes, they could certainly do a better job of it (perhaps by boosting funding for elections departments and perhaps by speeding up the process in various ways). But there is a limit to how fast they can go, because of the way the election laws for the state have been written.

Ballots are automatically mailed to all registered voters in each election. The voter then has options as to what they want to do. They can: not vote at all, vote by mail, vote by drop box, or vote in person on Election Day. Votes that are cast in person or via drop box are all collected when the polls close. Votes by mail only have to be postmarked by Election Day, so that even if the Post Office is slow and takes a whole week to deliver the ballot, they are still counted. Votes that are cast by mail or by drop box have a signature on the envelope which must be verified before those votes can be counted. Which takes time to do -- signature-verification cannot be automated and must be done by hand.

What regularly happens -- both in California and elsewhere -- is that Republicans tend to favor voting in person, while Democrats tend to cast more mail-in and drop-off ballots. The in-person votes are counted first, since they are the easiest to verify. This results in a "red mirage" in the early returns, since Republicans are more heavily represented in the in-person voting and thus Republican candidates start off with what look like big leads in the vote count. Then as more and more of the other ballots are verified and counted, Democrats tend to catch up.

This is precisely what is happening in California right now. This election was one where a whole lot of voters (myself included) waited until almost the last possible moment to cast their ballots. I used a drop box to cast mine. Others mailed them in. The reason for waiting was to see how the various Democratic candidates for governor were doing in the polls at the very end of the race, which changed the minds of many Democrats when they actually cast their ballots (for complex reasons). So this election in particular had a lot more ballots that arrived at the last moment or trickled in later in the mail.

There is nothing sinister about this. But try telling that to Trump and his ilk. In fact, one reason that California is so slow is that they do take the time and effort to verify all those signatures -- as an anti-fraud measure. Also, any voter can choose to be notified when their ballot is being processed and when it is counted. There are all sorts of safety and tracking mechanisms built into the process. Which Republicans really should applaud, since they make such a big deal out of election integrity, right?

Instead, we get conspiracy theories. Which don't even make sense, in some ways. Take the L.A. mayor's race. For all the whining that the Democrats "rigged the result," the reality is that if the Democratic Party did want to engineer a result from this election, they would have done so to ensure that the Republican candidate (who is a complete whack job, by the way) would make it to the general election. That would pretty much guarantee the re-election of the sitting Democratic mayor. Now, she'll have to face a Democratic challenger (one who is seen as "far left"), who could conceivably defeat her. That's not what the Democratic Party establishment wants at all. But because the election wasn't rigged, the chips fell where they did, no matter how much Trump and all his followers whine and fulminate about it.

That Justice Department prosecutor is just trying to keep Trump and his MAGA followers happy, by prematurely announcing that election fraud charges would be filed -- just as soon as someone walks into his office with some, you know, actual evidence of wrongdoing. But the danger for him is that when he doesn't get any evidence of any wrongdoing he may just decide to bring charges anyway, just to please his political boss.

It has been ten years since Donald Trump first started beating the drum of elections being "rigged" against him and his party. In all that time, there has never been any evidence of any widespread plot to rig elections in any way, anywhere that has stood up in a court of law. So even if spurious charges are brought in the next few months in California, it is highly unlikely that those charges will stand up either.

What is worrisome in all of this is what will happen in November. If Democrats do manage to take back control of either house of Congress, it will doubtlessly lead to an absolute tsunami of wild and baseless charges of election fraud, from Donald Trump and all his followers. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out in California over the next few months, since it may be a preview of what could happen in a whole lot of places after the midterms.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant