In all seriousness, here's what's going on in California and Los Angeles and why Tom Steyer and Nithya Raman might incredibly surpass Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt even though they're both trailing them by 6-7 points a full three nights after Election Day.
Since September 2020, California's been mailing out full ballots to every single registered voter. Registering is trivially "easy" in California. Can do it with any DMV interaction. So 10s of millions of ballots are sent out each state election, primaries or general.
Ballot harvesting is completely legal in California. Any one can go around and collect ballots. Just need the voter to sign over the ballot to them, as well as sign their own name and address on the sealed envelope.
Ballots must be postmarked by 8 p.m. Election Day or returned in person by that same time. Must also be signed once; or, if harvested, it must be signed and also signed over to the harvester (as I said above). ALL ballots are supposed to be received by June 9th, one calendar week after election day.
Most voters just turn in their own ballots. But many have their ballots harvested, "legally," by harvesters. They target younger voters, lower-income voters, and minority voters. These are voters who tend to sit out during midterm elections. It's the case everywhere.
It's obviously easier to harvest ballots when it's very close to election day. It's easier because by then, the lower-propensity voters who haven't voted yet consider their ballots to be effectively meaningless. So who cares if they hand it over (completed and sealed, of course) to a ballot harvester. *This is big reason why so many ballots get returned on Election Day or just 1-2 days prior to E-day. They get mailed via USPS, or dropped off in person. This is why so few ballots are in the possession of election officials by Election day or even the day after.*
Again, the ballots must be signed; and, if harvested, signed over to the harvester; and postmarked by Election Day. Important caveat here is that if a ballot fails these tests, they're not simply discarded. Rather, they are "cured" and "rehabilitated." Seriously. So yes, a ballot must be postmarked by Election Day by law, but the law doesn't discard these ballots if they fail that test.
Harvested ballots often do not have a signature or the handover signature. Or they have signatures that do not match the name. To you, this means that they should be discarded, no? But to the State, it means they need to be cured and rehabilitated. They have 30 days to do this.
And yes, ballots are all supposed to be received a week after election day. But that's not "received by the counting machine." It's received by whatever local election office is supposed to receive the ballots. Again, how this is enforced, or if it even is, is a mystery.
Activist organizations know all of this so they harvest heavily in the final days before an election, including on election day. In some cases, they can look at polling and prior VBM/early voting trends and then invest more in their ballot harvesting efforts to push their candidate over the edge. The current 3rd place gubernatorial candidate has billions to spend, but he still has to allocate that money as well as save some of it for the general election. If he sees that he's trailing by 3-4 points in the polls and that Ds are underperforming turnout rates in VBM/Early voting, he would be wise to invest in ballot harvesting in the final week.
All of this is why (1) so very many ballots are not even received a full three days and three nights after Election day began, (2) why so many of them apparently lean for the Democrats, (3) why it takes literal weeks to count all the ballots, (4) why so few ballots are counted in the 2nd and 3rd day after E-day, and (5) why you are right to be suspicious.