Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman cut deeper into the lead of reality television personality Spencer Pratt on Saturday, as his lead slimmed to just a single percentage point.

Pratt fell to just over 27% of the vote while Raman jumped up to slightly over 26%, according to the results from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder. Pratt now leads Raman by just 7,494 votes.

“We’ve seen Nithya Raman catching up on every update and the last two in particular she’s accelerated,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the bipartisan voter data firm Political Data Inc. “She’s continued to gain at a rate that means she will eventually catch up unless Pratt starts getting some ballots coming in that are either geographically or demographically better for him.”

Democratic consultant Michael Trujillo, who doesn’t represent anyone in the mayoral race, said the results suggest Raman will surpass Pratt as more votes are counted.

“I think it’s over,” Trujillo said. “It appears Nithya will be in the runoff. Pratt doesn’t appear to be growing much more than what the Trump base vote was and we’ll probably get an update tomorrow showing that.”

The second-place finisher in the mayoral primary will face Mayor Karen Bass in a Nov. 3 runoff. On election night Tuesday, the Associated Press determined that Bass had secured enough votes to qualify for the runoff.

Pratt has been in second place since then, but Raman has gradually eroded his lead as mail-in ballots have been counted. The updated vote tally released Thursday showed Pratt with 29% of the vote and Raman with 23%.

With Friday’s update, Raman’s share had risen to 25% and Pratt’s shrank to 28%, for a 3 percentage point gap.

In the most recent batch of mail-in ballots counted, Raman received 23,514 votes, while Pratt gained 10,336.

Election analysts expected Raman to gain ground as the mail-in ballots were tallied, reasoning that many left-of-center voters — Raman’s base — held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates. They also say younger, more progressive voters tend to hold onto their ballots longer generally.

Although the mayor’s race is nonpartisan, Pratt is a Republican in a city that is overwhelmingly dominated by Democratic voters and elected officials.

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, had Pratt running in third place behind Bass and Raman.

The poll of 1,351 likely voters conducted May 19-24 had Bass with 26% support, Raman with 25% support and Pratt with 22% support, with a 3% margin of error.

Los Angeles voters have become accustomed to seeing election results change as late-arriving ballots are tabulated. In the 2022 mayoral primary, real estate developer Rick Caruso led the pack for about a week before Bass pulled ahead.

Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for Caruso, according to a Times analysis of precinct-level returns provided by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on Wednesday, when an estimated 62% of the projected vote had been counted. Raman, by comparison, made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Pratt, whose Pacific Palisades fire home burned in the January 2025 fire, was strong there and on the Westside, as well as in the San Fernando Valley communities of Encino, Woodland Hills, Chatsworth and Sunland-Tujunga.

Raman dominated precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park, including her home base of Silver Lake.

Mail-in ballots with an election day postmark will continue to be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

An international committee of experts says it has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The revisions to the decades-old Declaration of Principles, created and maintained by the International Academy of Astronautics’ SETI Committee, come just days before the release of “Disclosure Day,” a movie about alien visitation directed by Steven Spielberg.

This is the first major update to the committee’s protocols in more than 15 years. “The information environment we operate in today is vastly more complex than it was in 2010,” committee chair Michael Garrett, an astrophysics professor at the University of Manchester, said in a news release. “In an era of deepfakes, automated misinformation and instant global connectivity, a single unverified claim could trigger confusion or panic. These new protocols ensure that scientists maintain the highest standards of evidence before making announcements to the world.”

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, more widely known as SETI, has become just as vastly more complex. At first, SETI primarily involved monitoring radio emissions for patterns that could point to intentional signaling. Now the search has widened to watch for excess infrared heat signatures, optical laser emissions or even anomalous gravitational waves.

Don’t be quick to shout ‘aliens’

In its revised protocols, the IAA SETI Committee acknowledges the new modes of SETI research as well as the emerging challenges facing SETI researchers. It calls for the organizations that support those researchers to shield them from harassment, doxing, intense media scrutiny and other “negative professional repercussions.”

The guidelines confirm that SETI practitioners and their institutions should be able to report their activities and share their results publicly. They should be free to respond to reasonable inquiries from news outlets, social-media platforms and other information channels. But the guidelines stress that no public announcement confirming alien contact should be made until a signal or an artifact has been authenticated by independent organizations using different instrumentation.

“We do not shout ‘alien’ the moment we see a strange blip,” Garrett said. “The scientific method demands we check, check again, and then ask others to check. Only when we have reached a consensus that a signal is credible do we bring it to the world.”

If the evidence of extraterrestrial origin is deemed credible, the discoverers or their institutions should promptly report their conclusion to the scientific community and the U.N. secretary-general — and be given the opportunity to make the first public announcement.

If E.T. phones, don’t rush to answer

A formal verification report should be distributed to relevant organizations including the IAA, the International Astronomical Union, the Committee on Space Research, the International Telecommunications Union and the U.N. Office of Outer Space Affairs. Verification data should be stored in at least two tamper-proof repositories in different geographic locations, and open-access publication of the data is encouraged.

The IAA SETI Committee says it will set up a Post-Detection Subcommittee that can engage with news organizations and social-media platforms to help disseminate accurate information. And it says no one should try to reply to an extraterrestrial signal until there are appropriate international consultations, with the United Nations and other broadly representative international organizations playing the leading roles.

The revised declaration was ratified by the full board of the Paris-based IAA, and a technical presentation is scheduled for October at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey.

“The release of these updated rules and protocols marks an important step in acknowledging both the radically different media landscape that science functions within today, and the vastly expanded efforts in terms of technology and resources being deployed in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth,” said committee member Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the California-based SETI Institute. “We applaud Professor Garrett’s leadership in developing these new protocols, and the IAA for their ratification.”

Balancing rigor and candor

Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, said in an email that the updated protocol “tries to strike a balance between letting SETI scientists conduct their research in a rigorous fashion and the competing demand to keep the public informed about what would be one of humankind’s greatest discoveries.”

“The better the public understands the complex process of confirming whether a signal from aliens is real, the better they will understand the vital need to foster one of the hardest of human virtues: patience,” he said.

Vakoch said the updated protocol recognizes that “everything changes once we detect a signal from alien intelligence.”

“Finally we will be able to gain the attention of the United Nations and other international bodies that so far have refused to make this a priority. Once we have a confirmed detection, we’ll finally be able to convene a globally representative assembly to decide how best to respond,” he said. “Until then, we need to move ahead with our attempt to make first contact in the same way SETI scientists always have — by recruiting experts who recognize the importance of these issues even before we know for sure there’s other life in the universe.”

Vakoch, who has studied the options for communicating with aliens since his high-school days in the late 1970s, noted that the protocol specifically avoids addressing “the separate and distinct subject of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence in advance of a confirmed detected extraterrestrial signal,” a strategy known as METI.

“Though METI scientists have always sought a broad-based, global discussion of how best to communicate with other technological civilizations, including the ethical and practical issues of how best to represent humankind, they face the same challenges as SETI scientists in gaining access to organizations like the United Nations,” Vakoch said. “The new protocol explicitly recognizes that sending messages to the stars before we make first contact requires a different process than the one that’s laid out for sending a response to a signal we receive from space.”