You could say that many of our elections now, particularly in places such as New York City, are reminiscent of the Third World.
Except that would be an insult to the Third World.
In poor Brazil, after all, where many people suffer greater privation than our vagrants do, the latest election’s results were known in four hours. They just counted the votes — simple addition.
In NYC’s current mayoral race, it’s complete attrition. They count the votes, and count and count and count and count with the Big Apple’s new ranked-choice voting system until — when? When they powers-that-be get the result they want?
So wondered, essentially, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson last night, making the point that our elections have become “embarrassing.” It’s true, too, that it’s not just New York City. The 2020 presidential election count dragged on and on until, many have said, the steal was effected. And New York’s 22nd Congressional Race took literally months to decide. After all, Election Day is, well, so yesterday. Now it’s: Extend the time for voting and extend the time for counting and widen the vote-fraud window to Grand Canyon proportions.
Corruption and incompetence go hand in hand, and the latter was on full display in NYC as well, on Tuesday, when it was revealed that 135,000 test ballots had been included in the initial mayoral race results.
Carlson points out that the front-runner, relatively un-woke Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams (D), was initially mocked and likened to Trump for questioning the vote-tally discrepancy. “Rachel Maddow impersonator Chris Hayes accused Adams of engaging in ‘corrosive Big Lie conspiracy-theorizing,’” related Carlson. “‘This is some Donald Trump’ c[**]p, explained some kid at Vox.”
“‘This is the argument Trump used to declare election fraud,’ said another,” the host continued. “And so on. We were starting to think maybe QAnon was involved. Maybe Eric Adams was staging an insurrection.”
Note that Adams, an ex-police captain, had enjoyed an approximately 10-point lead in the race until the ranked-choices were factored in. Now his advantage has shrunk to two points over Kathryn Garcia, with thousands of absentee ballots yet to count. (Garcia may be perfectly situated to ensure that the “wrong” ballots end up in the garbage — she’s her city’s sanitation commissioner.)
Now, New York City is basically a one-party (Democrat) metropolis, so the current Democrat primary will almost assuredly determine who’ll be mayor. But as the current debacle evidences, this complete control doesn’t make elections simpler but instead means intense conflict among “various shades of corrupt left-wingers,” as Carlson puts it.
We’ve seen this before, too. In the May 12, 2020 special election in Paterson, New Jersey — contested between two Democrats — the mail-in vote fraud was so egregious that a judge ordered a new election be held. (Too often, “absentee” ballots are from voters absent from the planet.)
But when the 135,000-vote discrepancy was discovered in the NYC race, Adams was vindicated, and the incompetence was even supposedly striking to America’s second-most incompetent mayor (next to Lori Lightfoot), Bill de Blasio.
“Deeply disappointing and indicative of the fact that the Board of Elections is broken, structurally broken, must be changed,” the man who once supported the Marxist Sandinistas stated. “Look, I don’t know how many times we’re gonna’ 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.”
But Carlson explained how this criticism is nonsense that serves to divert attention from the actual issue, saying:
It’s structurally broken. You hear that so often, always to justify some power grab or another, a rewrite of history. What does structurally broken mean? It means dumb, incompetent, dishonest people are in charge. The problem is not the system. The problem is the people running it.
Last year, the New York Times reported that quote: “Some staffers at the Elections 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 to the gym.” One employee, “caught workers smoking marijuana at the Brooklyn voting machine warehouse on an election night.” But remember America: don’t question the election results. Only fascists do that. Fascists and the QAnon army.
Oh, by the way, it wasn’t election officials, or even reporters or politicians, who discovered the 135,000-mayoral-vote discrepancy but people betting on the race in the online prediction market, according to Carlson.
Carlson correctly points out that the de facto socialist NYC establishment dislikes Adams because, though the man is black and thus checks an identity politics box, he’s also last week’s Democrat. He’s an ex-cop. He doesn’t believe in defunding the police or putting an undue onus on them. He has campaigned on a law-and-order platform. He has talked about how he’d carry a gun. He’s largely focusing on real issues instead of talking about how math is racist. So while he’s still a leftist, NYC’s white liberals detest him.
But it’s no surprise that the Big Apple has worms in its midst. What really should worry people is that incompetent leftists want to take a NYC-like voting system nationwide with H.R. 1 — and that they’re thus agitating because these people, who can’t run an election, want to run the whole country.
So they can’t even fly the little balsa wood plane with the rubber band and string, but still insist they should take the jumbo jet’s helm. It’s a sure recipe for crashing the nation.
