Wednesday, FNC host Tucker Carlson opened his program with a scathing rebuke of the recent New York City Democratic Party mayoral primary.
Carlson noted the recent trend in New York elections, which he said has left much to be desired.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Last week, Democrats in New York City voted for a new mayor. It’s the end of the de Blasio era New York is a one-party state, Republicans are as rare and exotic as Esperanto speakers in New York, so the Democratic primary effectively is the same as the general election. That’s the vote.
So in New York, they don’t really have partisan battles, all the bickering is between various shades of corrupt left-wingers. In some ways, you’d think it would be easier to get elections done, but you’d be wrong.
Eight days later, we still have no idea who the next mayor of New York will be. All the votes are in, they’ve all been counted supposedly. The problem is that no one in charge can do math. Addition is the main stumbling block.
It’s hard to overstate just how embarrassing this is. In Brazil, a very poor country where a lot of people have far less than the homeless do in New York City, the latest national election took a total of four hours to tally. They just added up all the votes and then they announced the result. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
But not in New York, it’s just too complicated — all those numbers.
After last November’s election, it took three months for New York’s Board of Elections to figure out who the state was going to send to Congress. It may take that long to determine who the next mayor of New York City is.
The funny thing is that as of yesterday morning, it seemed pretty clear. Eric Adams, a former New York City police captain was well ahead of everyone else in the race. He had a double-digit lead. Then in the afternoon, things changed dramatically.
City officials released new vote tallies indicating that in fact, Adams might lose. His 12-point lead had shrunk to two points and there were still thousands of absentee ballots still outstanding. How could that happen eight days after the vote? It seemed impossible. Nothing like that had ever happened in the history of this country, at least since November in the presidential election.
And Eric Adams understandably wanted to know what the hell was going on, so he asked. And in response to his question, the guardians of our democracy mocked him. Got questions about an election result? You must be Donald Trump. Rachel Maddow impersonator, Chris Hayes, accused Adams of engaging in quote, “corrosive big lie conspiracy theorizing.”
This is some Donald Trump crap, explained some kid at VOX. “This is the argument Trump used to declare election fraud,” said another, and so on. We could go on.
We were starting to think that maybe QAnon was involved, maybe Eric Adams was staging an insurrection. And then late last night, we found out that Adams was in fact right to be skeptical.
Now, we learned this not from journalists, they were too busy sneering at Eric Adams on Twitter. The facts of the case were brought to us instead by people betting in the online prediction markets, people who put money on the Mayor’s race and therefore had a stake in the outcome. They can do math, so they did the math and they realized that the numbers were fraudulent.
Based on their reporting and again, they’re not even reporters, a few hours later officials in New York had to release a new statement. Now the statement was not printed on the official Board of Elections stationary assuming that even exists, no, the statement was drafted on the notes application from an iPhone then it was screenshot and then it was posted on social media.
Message, we’re totally lame. The statement explained that the city’s vote tally had in fact quote, “Included both test and election night results producing approximately 135,000 additional records.” Additional records? What’s an additional record? Well that’s a fake vote, 135,000 fake votes/
Now that’s a debacle so profound that even Bill de Blasio gazing up glassy eyed from his one-hitter claimed to be totally blown away.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: Deeply disappointing and indicative of the fact that the Board of Elections is broken, structurally broken, and must be changed
Look, I don’t know how many times we have to have this conversation. We can no longer have a partisan Board of Elections. It does not work. It’s not modern, it’s not professional.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “It’s structurally broken,” you hear that so often, always to justify some power grab or another rewrite of history. What does structurally broken mean? Well, it means that dumb, incompetent, and dishonest people are in charge in other words the problem is not the system; the problem is the people running the system, and in New York, it is a problem.
Last year, “The New York Times” reported that quote, “Some staffers at the Election Board read or watch Netflix at the office, others regularly fail to show up for work with no fear of discipline. Several employees said some staffers punch in and then leave to go shopping or go to the gym.” One employee said the newspaper quote, “Caught workers smoking marijuana at the Brooklyn voting machine warehouse on election night.”
But remember, America, don’t question the election results, only fascists do that. Fascists — and the QAnon Army.
This would all be pretty funny if we were confined to New York, like a lot of things, bed bugs for example, they’re all over New York. You don’t have them. They don’t really bother you, it’s kind of hilarious that they have it.
But this is not confined to New York. The very same people running the New York City Democratic primary are now demanding — at full volume and if you don’t agree, you’re a racist — control of the whole country’s election system. Remember H.R. 1? That’s what that is. Put these people in charge of your elections and that should worry you because these people are incompetent. They have no skills of any kind. They could not paint a garage door if they had to.
They do not know where food comes from, they don’t make their own beds. They are useless, which is why they are so miserable. People with no skills are unhappy. They’re totally incapable of anything that requires discipline or precision.
Now, a long time ago, we created Gender Studies departments precisely so that people like this would have something to do during the day, kind of get them out of circulation and give them a little job they could do. But it wasn’t enough for them. Now, they want real power. They’d like control of the power grid. They want to fly your airplanes.
And now, they want to run your elections. Yes, no. Can’t do that. Because not only are they without skills, they’re crazed ideologues. They think math is racist.
For hundreds of years, the United States had the best election system in the world. You can’t really improve on it. You vote on Election Day, you vote in person with an ID to prove you are who you say you are, and you use paper ballots so there’s no question about who you voted for because we can all check.
Canada does it to this day. For all of Canada’s problems that’s how they run their elections. In fact, most of the rest of the world does that. But no, we can’t do that anymore because racism.
So instead, we have to put people like this in charge of our elections.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Listen kiddo, I get it. I don’t like the two-party. I think our country is corrupt and quite frankly, I don’t want to vote for Biden. It feels like voting for a Republican. But I am going to do it.
You want to know why? Because the alternative [bleep] fascist. A fascist. Is a fascist.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I just have [bleep] life, [bleep]. I am in miserable paying job and I just want to say, I want to be myself — yourself [bleep] stupid.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have to stop sleeping with Republicans. Knock that off. They are all going to die out or start inbreeding anyway.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I am terrified. Listen to me, Republicans, listen. You are the people in history they warned us about. They warned us about people like you.
Pay attention. We’re losing our democracy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, that’s the coalition. The coalition of the unhappy. Let’s keep them on TikTok, shall we. “We’re losing our democracy.”
It’s pretty amusing in this specific case given that just a few years ago, the City of New York changed its election laws to make its process less democratic. Instead of just counting all the ballots and choosing a winner based on who had the most votes, that’s called democracy, New York along with the State of Maine and a couple of other highly progressive places now has a system known as ranked choice voting.
In ranked choice voting, people don’t vote for one candidate on their ballots. No. Because the system isn’t confusing enough now, they rank up to five candidates in order of their preference. It’s a multiple choice test, then once all the ballots are counted, the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes is eliminated, then — and this is the key part — all of the votes for that eliminated candidate are then reallocated to the other candidates.
Following this?
So, if you voted for the last place finisher as your top choice, your vote is reallocated to the next candidate on your list. This process repeats for several rounds. It’s hard to imagine anything more pointlessly complicated or crazy or undemocratic than this.
Ranked choice voting lets the losers pick the winner.
So, why in the name of democracy would you be for that? Well, as with most bad ideas at this point, ranked choice voting is a product of the equity craze. Democracy is absolutely not the point. The people who have lobbied for ranked choice voting in New York were very explicit about why they were doing it.
One of those who lobbied for it was a woman called Amy Torres and she told lawmakers a couple of years ago in 2019 that ranked choice voting, quote, ” … is an option that would really increase the power of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander electorate because we would be engaged on the same issues that the rest of the electorate is engaged on,” end quote.
Now the first tip off to the insanity of all of this is a system that empowers people based on their skin color or ethnicity. That is racist and wrong and we should reject it out of hand every time, but as a literal matter, what did she just say? And of course the answer is nothing. It was, as it so often is, meaningless word salad. It was meant to hide rather than expose the real point of ranked choice voting.
And the real point is that it gives the people in charge a lot more power than they had before. It gives them more control over the outcome and you’re seeing this in New York. It should not be a surprise to anyone that the people running New York are now using ranked choice voting to shaft Eric Adams.
Now why is that? Eric Adams is African-American. He is liberal. He’s the Brooklyn Borough President, you’d think that white liberals in New York would love him. Oh no, they hate him.
Interesting. Why is that? Because he says things that are true, things like maybe we shouldn’t allow criminals to knife people on the subway.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ERIC ADAMS (D), NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL CANDIDATE: It doesn’t make any consolation if a police officer shoots someone illegally or if some — a gang banger in blue jeans — no matter what community I am in, people want their families to be safe and that resonates with everyday New Yorkers and I know my message will resonate with them.
If we’re not safe in this city, companies are not coming to New York. Our multibillion dollar tourism industry is not going to return if tourists are shot at Grand Central Station, and so the first order of business is to get violence under control.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, it’s interesting. So by saying maybe it’s a good idea to have a subway you can use where you don’t get shot while waiting for your train, Eric Adams predicted that he would unite the city across racial lines and guess what happened? He did. Because every normal person agrees with that.
Eric Adams won most black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City and on Staten Island. You’d think white liberals would be happy about this. They hate it, and they want to stop Eric Adams.
Now, Eric Levitz at New York Magazine was pretty honest about this last week. In a column, he described Eric Adams who is a full-blown liberal by the way as too right-wing and then he said in a line that is worth remembering, he said, Eric Adams is conservative because his base is non- white voters.
How interesting is that. He is acknowledging that Eric Adams is pulling non-white voters, “he has strong ties to non-white voting blocs” is the exact quote and that’s why he, as a white liberal cannot support him. That’s amazing. In other words, Eric Adams is not under their control.
He is against defunding the police. He is not funded by George Soros. He doesn’t have some dystopian nihilistic view of what the city should be. He doesn’t talk about equity as much as the rest of them, so they’re not under his control and they want to crush him. He is too right-wing. They’re admitting that out in the open.
Meanwhile, the Board of Elections is admitting it just invented a hundred thousand votes to bury Eric Adams. It’s not hard to see why they’re doing this. When you don’t need voters, you don’t need to lie to them anymore. Unbelievable.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor