Last week’s tedious vote count that ultimately determined the Senate’s balance has provoked the ire of one of the most outspoken deniers of the 2020 presidential election result: Tucker Carlson. His incoherent complaints about the slowness in obtaining a result suggest either that Carlson has finally come unglued over the apparent political demise of his hero, Donald Trump, or Carlson has just plain ol’ come unglued.
On Election Night, Carlson complained that electronic voting machines — capable of dramatically speeding up vote counts — need to be scrapped altogether. “We’re not really very serious about democracy if we’re using electronic voting machines. … So I hope if there’s one thing that comes out of this, and I hope it’s bipartisan — no electronic voting machines.” Eliminating electronic voting machines necessarily means slower vote-counting.
Two nights later, Carlson went on an impatient rant about the slow vote. “Forty-eight hours after the voting stopped, there’s still 633,000 ballots still uncounted in Arizona,” he told viewers on Thursday night. “More than 400,000 of those are in Maricopa County. … When will we know the results?”
He added: “It’s hard to understand this. It’s not a resource problem certainly. The budget of Maricopa County is about $4.5 billion a year. For perspective, the entire Hoover Dam cost $890 million to build and yes, that is in adjusted dollars. For the price of five Hoover Dams, Maricopa County can’t even count the ballots in a single statewide election in a country that claims to care about democracy.”
He wants fast election results but wants to outlaw the technology that makes vote counts faster. To bolster his point, Carlson bizarrely cited Venezuela as a model of efficiency: “In Venezuela, whatever you think of it, they tally their ballots within hours, but suddenly, we can’t manage to do that?”
In Venezuela, election results are known even before ballots are cast because Venezuela is a dictatorship. Doubly ironic is the amount of attention Carlson gave back in 2020 to what he and his guests alleged was Venezuelan manipulation of American electronic voting machines. (His guests blamed dictator Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013 but somehow managed to meddle in the 2020 vote count.) That allegation, repeated multiple times on Carlson’s show, embroiled Fox News in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. Given Fox’s vulnerability in that lawsuit, it’s amazing the network even allowed Carlson to mention Venezuela and electronic voting in the same sentence.
Perhaps that was the network saving Carlson and his viewers from total embarrassment as his Fox News colleagues suddenly switched to trash-talking Trump and blaming him for last week’s dismal Republican performance. Carlson, apparently, would rather rant incoherently than acknowledge that Trump is now a spent force in American politics — as Carlson should be.
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