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“2000 Mules” Movie Lacks Evidence of Election Fraud
The movie’s evidence is a combination of anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cell phone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box.
The movie was produced by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws.
The movie was praised by former President Donald Trump as exposing “great election fraud.”
CLAIM: At least 2,000 “mules” were paid to illegally collect ballots and deliver them to drop boxes in key swing states ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
THE FACTS: The finding is based on false assumptions about the precision of cellphone tracking data and the reasons that someone might drop off multiple ballots.
True the Vote has said it found some 2,000 ballot harvesters by purchasing $2 million worth of anonymized cell phone geolocation data in various swing counties across five states. Then, by drawing a virtual boundary around a county’s ballot drop boxes and various unnamed nonprofits, it identified cell phones that repeatedly went near both ahead of the 2020 election.
However, geolocation is severely limited in its precision. True the Vote presented its data to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who wrote back that their allegations of “mules” submitting additional ballots was not proven by the data presented, which only indicated presence within 100 feet of a ballot drop box.
If a cell phone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. 1 to Election Day, True the Vote assumed its owner was a “mule”.
Cell phone location data is imprecise and can not be tracked to the box. Meaning if someone drove by an area, True the Vote could have counted them as a “mule” under their definition.
As boxes are in busy areas, the likelihood of innocent citizens driving by is very high, especially delivery drivers, postal workers, cab drivers, poll workers and elected officials who all have legitimate reasons to cross paths with numerous drop boxes or nonprofits in a given day.
While True the Vote has been careful in the maps that they have shown, they submitted some maps from Wisconsin. The dots on the map represent cell phone pings, which tend to overlap with Milwaukee streets. Nothing about this map shows that people deliberately drove to the drop-box locations, they just happened to be on the side of the road that people were driving on.
In “2000 Mules,” there is a map shown (blue lines with orange dots representing drop-boxes on the map below). Real drop-box locations were overlaid on top of the map (white lines with white circle drop boxes). These drop-box locations do not overlap, and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote has since admitted that the map was fake.
Further, there is no evidence that True the Vote or D’Souza knew where at an address a drop box was. Even if a drop box was behind a building, for example, their model would have counted somebody driving by the street address at the front of the building.
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CLAIM: Alleged ballot harvesters were captured on surveillance video wearing gloves because they didn’t want to leave their fingerprints on the ballots.