Once again, this happened:

TJ Cox defeated three-term Republican Rep. David Valadao on Wednesday, giving Democrats a gain of seven House seats in California and 40 nationwide – the party's strongest midterm showing since the Watergate era in the mid-1970s.

Cox clinched his victory more than three weeks after election day, when updated results from Fresno and Kings counties pushed his lead over Valadao to 529 votes.  The contest was the country's last remaining undecided congressional contest.

Cox, 55, trailed the GOP lawmaker by nearly 4,400 votes on election night but steadily gained ground as mail-in and other ballots tipped his way.

That follows the obvious funny stuff that went with the sudden surge of "found" ballots that got Republican congressional candidate Young Kim displaced from her congressional victory to Democratic Party machine pol Gil Cisneros.  Both Kim and Valadao were terrific Republicans who had big leads on election night and, in both cases, had the elections actually called for them until...all these found ballots got found, and the counting went on and on and on until the Democrat won.

Even outgoing House speaker Rep. Paul Ryan, the nambiest-pambiest of all Republicans, pretty well admitted there was a problem.  According to Carla Marinucci of Politico:

"We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,'' Ryan said Thursday.  "This election system they have – I can't begin to understand what 'ballot harvesting' is."

Seriously, isn't it all just the wildest of coincidences?  Even more coincidental, all the voting went one way: to the Democrats.  A powerful op-ed by California Republican National Committee leader Shawn Steel pretty well lays out what happened, why the Democrats could scarf up all but a few of California's congressional seats, even though they came in districts that were always traditionally Republican, leaving California with almost zero Republican representation whatever in what has become a Stalinist one-party state monopoly with no competition and a revolutionary left-wing agenda.  He sums it up in the SEO as follows: "No one needs voter fraud when all the rules are changed."  He points out that creepy practices such as "ballot harvesting" (where Democratic operatives gather mail-in ballots and oh, so helpfully turn them in), which is illegal in most states, and California's bad Department of Motor Vehicle registrations, loaded with errors, had a lot to do with it.  He also points to youth "pre-registration" voting sign-ups, even though kids get registered whether they like it or not at the DMV; felons getting their crimes downgraded to misdemeanors so as to get to vote from jail; illegal aliens voting – studies show it was a lot of them; and involuntary mail ballots (I get those, and I most certainly didn't ask for them) mean lots of paper ballots lying around from people who may not want to vote or don't live here, sitting in mailboxes – that somehow get filled in and turned in.

It really is a corrupted process, and not surprisingly, Democrats are the sole beneficiaries while the state's many traditional Republicans are shut out and get nothing.

The man who can stand up and take a bow for California's elections: secretary of state Alex Padilla, official photo.

Most disgusting of all is California secretary of state Alex Padilla's snide insistence that the voting process is all clean, and the spectacle of all people wanting to vote socialist (just like the Stalin days in Russia), far from being strange, is what "we call democracy."  Leon Trotsky could not have said it better.

It's not surprising he talks like that.  It is, after all, his show. He's one of the officials who refused to cooperate with President Trump's electoral integrity commission on fraudulent voting, something that eventually had to be shut down.  With him yelling "democracy," all we can wonder now is what he is hiding.