NYC election debacle should worry every American: Karol Markowicz
New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz on New York City's election 'debacle.'
New York Post opinion columnist Karol Markowicz said Wednesday that New York City's mayoral race is the latest "debacle" for the city after previous electoral process failures.
"This is actually not the first election in New York that this has happened. In 2019, when Governor Cuomo signed this modernizing of our election laws, every election since then has been a disaster. The Democratic presidential primary in June, it wasn't ranked voting but it was a complete debacle," Markowicz told "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
Markowicz said New York's special election in February "was a disaster and took weeks and weeks to count the votes."
"And here we are again," Markowicz said.
The New York City Board of Elections released an update Wednesday evening, showing mayoral candidates Eric Adams neck-and-neck with Kathryn Garcia following the fallout over a significant tabulation error.
The city’s rank-choice votes are largely in, with Adams edging ahead of Garcia by 51 percent to 49 percent of the votes, though there are another 124,000 absentee ballots still to be counted.
New York launched rank-choice voting this year – which relies on voters ranking their candidate preferences in order rather than selecting one candidate on the ballot.
The city’s mayoral race was the first major test in the new voting system, but the board’s Tuesday announcement that 135,000 pre-election test votes had been accidentally counted left some questioning the new system.
"Yesterday's ranked-choice voting reporting error was unacceptable and we apologize to the voters and to the campaigns for the confusion," Commissioners of the Board of Elections said in a statement Wednesday.
"Let us be clear: rank-choice voting was not the problem, rather a human error that could have been avoided," the group said, adding that the error had been corrected and an extra layer of review implemented.
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Markowicz said that "election officials have not learned anything and keep repeating the same mistakes."
"I think you said it best where you went into the voting booth, you got a paper ballot, you produced an I.D., and this was a system that made sense," Markowicz said.
"What we have now makes no sense, and the fact they want to spread it to other states should worry everybody watching."
Markowicz followed Carlson's monologue in which he called out the "dumb, incompetent, dishonest people" who are running elections and warned of problems spreading around the country.
Under New York City’s new ranked-choice voting system, voters can choose their top five candidates in order. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, election officials knock off the candidate with the least amount of first-choice votes and count the second-choice option on the ballots that ranked the losing candidate highest.
Crime was clearly at the top of the minds of Big Apple voters, as Adams ran a campaign squarely centered on cracking down on violence. Adams and Garcia both pledged to add more cops to NYC subways, which have been at the center of a rise in gruesome attacks over the past year.
Fox News' Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
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