Did They Steal the Election From Trump?

Was Trump’s reelection stolen? That’s a big claim, and it will require clear and convincing evidence to back it up. So far, allegations have been made, but the evidence has not been revealed.

There’s still time, but not much. Either the claims will fade, or a bombshell will explode. It’s still not clear which it will be. It is clear that investors need to be prepared for either outcome.

Let’s begin with the easy stuff. There was fraud in this election. The Trump team has hundreds of sworn affidavits by a variety of poll workers, poll watchers and Postal Service employees, among others, attesting to fraud.

An affidavit is not a casual claim. It’s a sworn statement under oath. Anyone who lies on an affidavit can be charged with fraud or other crimes. So, let’s give credence where it’s due and assume that at least most of these claims are true.

The claims themselves relate to acts such as banning poll watchers from the counting rooms, obstructing them when they were allowed inside, failure to verify signatures where required, receiving mail-in ballots past deadlines, backdating postmarks on mail-in ballots to make it appear they were received timely when they were not, trashing Trump ballots, running Biden ballots through scanners multiple times and more.

Other allegations involve more serious efforts such as a busload of Biden campaign workers in Nevada who received blank ballots after the polls had closed, quickly marked them for Biden, and then dumped them in boxes at polling stations where they were quickly added to the count to put Biden ahead.

Workers on the bus formed a human wall to obstruct Republican poll watchers and the media from observing the act of bringing the ballots off the bus before stuffing the ballot box.

Recounts don’t solve problems like this. If the ballots were fraudulently obtained, they will still be fraudulent no matter how many times you recount them. The root problem is still not addressed.

Some of the allegations are right out of a Mario Puzo novel. The Buffalo Chronicle reported on November 14 that the head of the Philadelphia Mafia, Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino ran an operation in South Philly involving massive ballot fraud to support Biden.

According to the story based on a Mafia source:

Pennsylvania political operatives …ordered up 300,000 election ballots marked for Biden. The source alleges that Merlino and a lean team of associates manufactured those ballots at a rate of $10 per ballot — a whopping $3 million for three days of work. They were then packaged into non-descript cardboard boxes and dropped off outside the Philadelphia Convention Center.

Merlino’s lawyer denied these allegations.

I grew up in and around Philly and went to law school in Philadelphia. I’ve followed the Mafia doings there for decades. The story has a ring of credibility despite denials.

Can I verify it? No. Can Trump verify it? That’s unlikely unless someone in the Mafia breaks the code of silence, which is highly unlikely.

Still, Biden’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania was 81,813 votes, according to RealClear Politics. If the Mafia story is true, then they came through for Biden in the same way that the Mob came through for John F. Kennedy in Chicago in the 1960 election.

We’ll find out eventually, but probably not in time to prevent Biden’s swearing-in ceremony.

There is also ample evidence provided by statistical analyses that the tempo and size of certain Biden surges in the vote count are almost impossible without vote-rigging. Some of the ballot dumps in the middle of the night in swing states showed percentages of 90% or even 100% for Biden, while the broader vote splits in the same jurisdiction were perhaps 60% for Biden.

Those kinds of anomalies don’t just happen without manipulation. The problem is that statistical studies might be interesting to political scientists, but they won’t persuade a judge. Trump needs smoking-gun evidence, and statisticians don’t qualify.

While interesting, all of these allegations mean nothing unless they can pass a three-part legal test. The first part is that they must be proved by clear evidence. The second part is that they must be of sufficient scale to change the outcome. The third part is that the courts must have jurisdiction and a statutory or constitutional basis on which to rule.

Remedies are another matter, but once courts are persuaded to decide a case, they can be highly creative when it comes to remedies.

Some of the voting fraud claims are easily proved, but don’t pass the second part of the test — they won’t change the outcome. In round numbers, Biden won by 13,000 votes in Georgia, 34,000 votes in Nevada, 11,000 votes in Arizona, and 82,000 votes in Pennsylvania.

Those margins are close, but not close enough to be turned around by even credible allegations of trashing ballots and some late mail-ins. Judges either won’t hear those cases or will quickly dismiss them as had happened already to some of Trump’s complaints.

The only way the election will be reversed is if the Trump campaign and their lawyers have clear evidence of a vote-rigging effort that was so large and pervasive that it not only changed the outcome of the election, but it constitutes an ongoing threat to the rule of law and the Constitution. They might…

The allegation (and, so far, it’s only an allegation with no clear proof) involves a company called Dominion Voting Systems that manufactures voting machines that use software from another company named Smartmatic.

These voting machines are not the simple scanner-tabulator type used in many jurisdictions. The Dominion machines look more like ATMs with touch screen features. They include computer chips and are networked to servers, some of which are located overseas. Behind the computer chips and server processors is source code written by Smartmatic engineers and developers who are so far unknown to the public.

Dominion’s ownership is opaque, but several reports indicate that it is owned by a trio of Venezuelan oligarchs. Early in its existence, Dominion machines were used to conduct rigged elections for Hugo Chavez to ensure that the dictator never lost an “election.”

In short, Dominion’s expertise in voting machines consists of election rigging. Through lobbyists and others, they have secured contracts to provide voting systems in 28 states and countries abroad.

Some reports point to Cuban and Chinese money being involved in the Dominion expansion into U.S. politics. Smartmatic is owned by Lord Malloch-Brown, a dedicated globalist and associate of George Soros.

Here’s the core allegation in a nutshell: Dominion voting machine code was programmed either at the machine level or the server level to variously switch Trump votes to Biden votes or to overcount Biden votes in accordance with a pre-set ratio.

An expanded version of this allegation says that on election night, Trump received so many votes that the rigged algo could not keep up with the landslide.

That’s why counting was shut down in several swing states in the middle of the night to allow time to flood the polling places with bogus paper ballots (of the ubiquitous “mail-in” kind) to make up the difference between what the rigged machines were providing and the votes actually needed to put Biden over the top.

Seasoned lawyers with solid reputations such as Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and Rudy Giuliani have described these and similar allegations in a recent series of interviews, press conferences and tweets.

Recent reports claim that Dominion-related servers were seized by U.S. agents on German soil acting on the basis of U.S. national security interests. I cannot independently verify those reports.

So far, the Trump advocates have advanced a narrative, but they haven’t provided solid proof. There may be good reason for that. You don’t hand the opposing coach your playbook before the game begins. If there are whistleblowers and other witnesses who can back up these claims, they may be in fear of being murdered and need time to organize personal protection and safe houses.

If all of this sounds like it’s the plot of a Hollywood thriller, well, that’s just the world we live in today.

There are two possible outcomes from this chain of events. The first is that the proof of the allegations is not convincing, that it amounts to nothing more than reasonable inference (at best) or baseless conspiracy theory (at worst). In that case, major reputations will be in shreds, and Biden will quickly be on his way to the Oval Office.

The second outcome is that the proof will be overwhelming, and the courts or state legislatures will have no choice but to appoint Trump electors to undo the damage caused at the ballot box.

In that case, Trump will win the Electoral College vote on December 14 (or possibly in the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021) and will serve a second term.

Though a Biden presidency seems more likely, it’s still unclear which path will prevail. We do know that investors should be prepared for either outcome by reducing portfolio volatility with cash, Treasury bills and gold.

Strap yourself in. It could be a wild few weeks.

Regards,

Jim Rickards
for The Daily Reckoning