LOS ANGELES BALLOTS LITERALLY TOO HOT TO HANDLE

Nothing says “vote early, vote often, vote carefully” like discovering that somebody apparently treated an official ballot drop box as a miniature pyrotechnics festival just days before Los Angeles’s big mayoral showdown. County workers found multiple mail-in ballots with fire damage outside the Department of Public Social Services building, which is a beautifully on-the-nose place for a civic system now doing what bureaucracy does best: calmly investigating a disaster after the fact while hoping the public mistakes paperwork for security. And because no election scandal is complete without a sequel, officials are also reviewing vandalism at a Long Beach vote center, though voting supposedly kept going there, proving once again that in American civic life, the show must go on even when the stage is on fire.