by Sharon Rondeau
(Nov. 3, 2021) — In a video posted on his Twitter feed Wednesday morning, co-host of Newsmax’s “Cortes & Pellegrino” Steve Cortes declared that constitutional violations occurred in the November 3, 2020 election which caused a majority of Republicans and one-third of Independents to disbelieve that Democrat Joe Biden was elected president legitimately over incumbent Donald J. Trump.
Cortes, a former Trump campaign operative and adviser and former CNN contributor, said in a video posted under the hashtag #ChalkTalk that while “great election news” emerged from Tuesday, “let’s not forget that one year today, an American election was hijacked, and that is believed by two-thirds of Republicans and one-third of Independents, according to all polling, that Biden is not the legitimate winner a year ago.”
“They have statistical as well as constitutional reasons to validate that belief,” Cortes continued, pointing to 19 “bellwether” counties which have correctly determined presidential winners over the last ten election cycles. “Donald Trump won 18 of these 19 counties, and yet we’re to believe he lost the election,” Cortes said. “It’s so improbable as to be impossible.”
“Mail-in” ballots in Wisconsin and Georgia were accepted at much higher rates than during the 2020 primaries, Cortes reported. “This statistic leads to the constitutional problem: the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment was massively violated. You cannot subject game-day Trump voters to entirely different and stricter standards than mail-in voters. It is one of the key reasons why the 2020 presidential vote was not valid.”
In an interview Wednesday morning with John Fredericks, Trump commented on Republican Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in the Commonwealth of Virginia, claiming that the “MAGA movement” contributed significantly. Trump had endorsed Youngkin in May and held a telephone rally on Monday night for him, which he told Fredericks he believed also played a role in the outcome.
Georgia citizens and other individuals, including then-Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, testified to evidence of voter fraud to the Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing in early December. Later that month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that election clerks erred when they permitted voters to claim “indefinite confinement” status, even given the COVID-19 “pandemic,” without showing proof of identification as the law requires.
Last Thursday, Racine County, WI Sheriff Christopher Schmaling gave a press conference in which a sergeant investigator, a previous county prosecutor, found the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) to have skirted state law requiring the dispatching of Special Voting Deputies, or SVDs, to nursing homes to collect any absentee ballots cast. Instead of sending the SVDs, Sgt. Luell said, the WEC authorized mail ballots to be sent to nursing homes and encouraged nursing-home employees to assist residents in completing their ballots.
A February 3, 2021 report issued by the WEC states that “More than a quarter-million Wisconsin voters chose to certify they were indefinitely confined under Wis. Stat. § 6.86(2)(a), generating controversy over their right to do so. Likewise, long-
term care facilities accustomed to the assistance of Special Voting Deputies had to make do without hands-on support. The concerns expressed by many residents after the election – founded or not – suggest election officials should continue to seek greater transparency, simplicity, and clarity in election processes” (p. 3).
A citizen-driven review of the 2020 Wisconsin election found more than 157,000 potentially fraudulent ballots divided among seven categories.
Since November 4, 2020, Trump has claimed that were it not for massive fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan, he would have won the election handily as evidenced by his significant leads in those states on the evening of November 3, as many polling locations were closing.
On Fredericks’s show Wednesday, Trump added Virginia to the list of states he claims are fraught with election “cheating.”
Cortes appears to have launched the #ChalkTalk series late last month to discuss current events and their intersection with politics. He is founder of the investment firm Vercruz, LLC and author of “Against the Herd: 6 Contrarian Investment Strategies You Should Follow.”