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‘2000 Mules’: Election Drop Boxes, ‘Geofencing,’ and ‘The Big Lie’
“We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” Joe Biden
Those were the exact words from a grainy clip of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden that opens a new movie by conservative author, pundit, and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, ‘“2000 Mules.” It was seen as just another gaffe by a candidate with a long history of malapropisms.
Salem Media Group and True the Vote (TTV) produced the movie. D’Souza relies on research from TTV’s President, Catherine Englebrecht, and TTV board member Gregg Phillips, a former state health official in Texas and Mississippi. Phillips also is a data analyst and the founder of several technology-related firms. He claims in the movie to have been “in and around” election integrity and analysis for 40 years.
Phillips is no stranger to controversy. He was the source of claims made by President Trump in 2017, never confirmed, that 3 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election. Mainstream media has worked overtime to discredit him and TTV, including a major investor’s claim that he was duped and other unsubstantiated claims. Yet, Phillips and TTV persist.
D’Souza, who launched a podcast in 2021 on the Salem platform, sets the stage with clips from three Republicans – former Attorney General Bill Barr (“Fraud did not play a role in the outcome of the election”), US Sen. Mike Rounds (“the election was fair”), and of course, US Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). He touches on “J6” at the US Capitol, claiming it “wasn’t an insurrection. It was a primal scream. They wanted their elected leaders to adjudicate the claims of election fraud.”
“We can’t ‘move on’ until we know the truth,” D’Souza continues. “Is it a ‘big lie?’ It is a lie at all?”
D’Souza also relies on a panel of Salem radio talk show and podcast hosts, including Dennis Prager, Eric Metaxas, Larry Elder, Charlie Kirk, and former Trump administration official Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Most express reservations about election fraud claims in the first interviews.
By the end of the movie, they’re aghast. You may be, too. One of the retorts we often hear concerning claims of vote fraud is the phrase “without evidence.” Except that D’Souza, Englebrecht, and Phillips provide actual official footage of crimes committed by “mules” in the form of drop-box stuffing of ballots, often during the dark of night. Most states, including Pennsylvania – a particular focus of illegal election activity in the movie – prohibit voters from casting more than one ballot, their own, at drop boxes.
Drop boxes – many of them privately funded via $400 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg through the left-wing Center for Tech and Civic Life – were a unique feature of the pandemic-scarred 2020 election. Most were placed in Democratic-leaning counties and jurisdictions.
Interestingly, as The Federalist reported, “Facebook has banned Trump from its platform and has delisted individuals — many of them conservatives — for espousing views about the election that it insists are “misinformation.”
Credit D’Souza for asking all the right questions throughout the movie. Let’s take one of the first: if Biden was so successful, why did Democrats lose so many down-ballot races for US House and other races? After all, a newly-elected President usually has coattails and sees increases in his party’s hold on Congress.
House Republicans gained 14 seats in 2020. In fairness, much of that is a rebound from the 2018 election when the GOP lost 40 seats. But, still, it is an anomaly for a new President to lose seats.
Pennsylvania is a better example. Biden “won” the state with 3.46 million votes and a margin of about 80,000 with 6.915 million votes cast. On election night, Trump led by nearly 800,000 votes before mail votes were counted. There were three other statewide elections for Attorney General, Treasurer, and Auditor General. Democrats held all, and other than Auditor General, a popular Democratic incumbent was on the ballot.
While Attorney General and 2022 Democratic gubernatorial nominee presumptive Josh Shapiro narrowly won reelection, the total ballots cast for Attorney General were over 110,000 fewer than for President.
Republican challengers Stacey Garritty (Treasurer) and Tim DeFoer (Auditor-General) won the other two races for the first time in several years. The ballot drop-off in those elections was nearly 150,000.
There are two explanations. First, a drop-off in ballots cast for down-ballot races is not uncommon, although 109,000 seems high. Second, in Act 77, the Pennsylvania legislature eliminated a ballot box for straight-party voting in 2020. If you are committing fraud by producing as many ballots as possible and only have time to mark one box, it will be for the top of the ballot – the presidency. Thus, the drop-off.
Phillips explained how TTV’s research worked. They obtained some 10 trillion cell phone “signals” using a petabyte of data. They narrowed their research to focus on “signals” that visited ten or more election drop boxes and five or more visits to “nonprofit” organizations that have collected ballots, starting in Georgia. They expanded their research to include Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
Remember, most state laws, including Pennsylvania, restrict the number of ballots (one) that any single voter can cast at a dropbox. Ballot harvesting – collecting and delivering ballots on behalf of voters – is illegal in most states. While most states have provisions to allow others to deliver ballots on their behalf, it is highly restricted.
A “mule” is a person who picks up ballots from an organization – “stash houses” – and delivers them to a series of drop boxes. According to Engelbrecht’s sources, mules are typically paid about $10 per ballot. They often take selfies of them depositing ballots to ensure payment. “In the Georgia (US Senate runoff, January 5, 2021), that payment was higher.”
Dozens of mules who participated in violent Antifa-BLM riots in Atlanta were also mules in the 2020 election, reports Phillips. Over 240 mules were identified in Atlanta. Some mules, especially in Michigan, visited about 100 dropboxes.
There were 1,100 mules identified in Philadelphia – many of driving back and forth across bridges from New Jersey – visiting as many as 50 drop boxes each. And TTV has 4 million minutes of surveillance video from across the country to help prove their case, obtained through open records requests. Except Wisconsin has no video, even though it was required under state law. Other jurisdictions, such as Arizona, turned off some footage. But where they do, TTV has the geospatial data to support the video.
Here is an Atlanta “mule” depositing – and dropping – ballots he’s stuffing into a dropbox during the night.
At one Gwinnett County, Georgia, 271 voters were videotaped dropping ballots at a drop box. Over 1,962 ballots were deposited, according to official “chain of custody” documents.
“This is organized crime,” Phillips asserts. With evidence. It appears even to violate federal racketeering laws (RICO).
And this is only from the first half of the movie. Watch the rest. You can access it here.
What will be done about this, given that Republican candidates are punished for making election fraud a top issue? Worse, can we expect the Biden Administration’s Justice Department to do anything?
The good news is that some jurisdictions are taking action, including either eliminating dropboxes or increasing surveillance. Some eighteen state laws have been changed to prevent “Zuckbucks” from privately subsidizing official elections, including Georgia. As for geofencing, a tool used chiefly by advertisers and law enforcement agencies, it is proving to be a valuable tool in elections. Including exposing fraudulent activity.
D’Souza then asks the $64,000 question – was the scope of election fraud big enough to tip the balance in the 2020 election. He says yes, especially in Georgia, Arizona, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The combined electoral votes from those three states were enough to put Biden over the top.
D’Souza leaves many questions unanswered. He does not disclose the names of “nonprofits” who acted as “stash houses” for mules to pick up and deposit multiple ballots. Where and how did these stash houses collect ballots? Where did the money come from to subsidize this effort? Will TTV provide this data to law enforcement authorities? Nowhere in America is it legal for nonprofit organizations to collect ballots and pay mules to deliver them, D’Souza asserts. Some 2000 mules visited 38 dropboxes each to deposit nearly 400,000 illegally-cast votes.
Associated Press attempted to “fact check” the movie. AP claims falsely that the film is based on a flawed analysis of geofenced data. They claim it isn’t precise, but that is laughably false. Drive up to any gasoline retailer who uses geospatial data to spot your presence at their pumps to text you with special deals. It has happened to me. Further, Phillips cited an instance where their geospatial data helped identify an alleged killer in Atlanta at the precise location where the murder occurred. The alleged killer has been arrested.
Election fraud is hard to prove. It takes time, money, and much effort, much more than was available between the November 2020 election and swearing-in day just 10 weeks later. There are unanswered questions. But eventually, the truth comes out. Like it or not, D’Souza has upped the anty on election integrity for the 2022 election. Local and state officials had better be prepared to respond.
Joe Biden might have been correct. Democrats and their allies may have created the largest and most inclusive voter fraud organization in American political history. Will we ever know with certainty?
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I don’t need to watch it. I already believe it.
Ohio.
Sock it to me!
Blast from the past! Compare that benign music video with the ones today where they have thugs and naked women.
Well, you’ve got yourself a topic for a new post!
But then again the States always get criticized when they clean up their voter rolls. The critics refer to it as “purging” as if it is something that Stalin would do.
And yet they’re supposed to be so much more modern now, and against objectification of women…
What was that Oscar-celebrated song not long ago? “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp?”
And the creepiest inauguration ever. That’s not the result of 81 million legal votes.
Guests and spectators attend the 59th Presidential Inauguration for President Joe Biden at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)
No, it’s the result of Coronavirus panic.
The modern view is that you cannot criticize Black people for absolutely anything, even murder, unless of course they are a Conservative. It’s the new morality.
Not true.
Hey, I thought you didn’t believe any of the statistics, they’re all false and made up! No? I’ll put that aside for the moment because I’m often skeptical of articles that are cheering for one side (like the one I linked). Besides, your chart only shows 20 of the 69 counties in PA. So I went right to the source – The Pennsylvania Department of State. Here is their archival data of voter registration by party from all counties:
https://www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/OtherServicesEvents/VotingElectionStatistics/Pages/VotingElectionStatistics.aspx
https://www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/OtherServicesEvents/VotingElectionStatistics/Pages/Voter-Registration-Statistics-Archives.aspx
Nov. 2016 – Democrat Registered Voters – 4,217,456 —Republican Registered Voters – 3,301,182
Nov. 2018 – Democrat Registered Voters – 4,111,325—-Republican Registered Voters – 3,270,882
Nov. 2020- Democrat Registered Voters – 4,228,888—Republican Registered Voters – 3,543,070
May 2022 – Democrat Registered Voters – 4,000,176—Republican Registered Voters – 3,450,048
So it looks like both parties increased from 2016 to the 2020 election, with the Republicans increasing more so by 7% vs. .3% but with Democrats still holding a large majority. Both parties had the mid-term dip in 2018 and again going into the 2022 mid-terms, the democrats predictably falling off the pace faster. It does look like Republicans are making some gains on the Democrats but they are still pretty far behind for a Swing State.
I don’t but even the data you people hold as gospel truth expose anomalies that can’t be explained away other than by cheating. The other 49 counties likely didn’t have absurd outcomes. They’re probably irrelevant to the argument.
These are outcomes versus trends and none of them square with logic, history or math. Here are more:
These inference to the best explanation arguments are interesting, and I think there is something to them. I may, if I ever have a chance to catch up on electronic fraud allegations and everything else, get back to them and see what I can make of all the anomalies, explanations, and rebuttals of the explanations.
In the meantime, this stuff is a clue to look for more information, more evidence that something was very wrong with Election 2020.
I’ve found some of that.
Evidence that has survived a round of fact-checking indicates that votes illegally cast or counted more than double the Biden margin of victory in five swing States.
I don’t really need anything else to go on
One would have been enough.
Yes. Even apart from electronic fraud, even apart from fraud as such flipping swing states, this is, all by itself, a national disgrace five times over.
And one which the US State Department would have decried in any other country.
Depending who won their election…
You cannot compare turnout percentage before 18 year-olds could vote and now. It is a different pool of voters.
So disappointing that even after this movie, plus everything else, Kevin Williamson and @charlescwc still refer to “election deniers.”
Why not? The range of voter turnout before the voting age dropped to 18 in 1971 was just as variable and in the same range as it was after teenagers got to vote. For instance in 1932 voter turnout was 52% and in 1960 it was 62%. Even after lowering the voting age we had a 13-point shift between the elections of 1996 and 2020. The first chart I posted showed that voter turnout has had wild swings in our history that are much greater than the 5 or 6% of people added to the pool by lowering the voting age.
They’ve assisted it in plenty of countries. One recent one in an Eastern European country comes to mind…something starting with a Ukr….I think…I’m trying to remember
Why would you expect them to do anything else? To even suggest that cheating existed would jeopardize their sinecures. Kevin knows well that pain when he lost his cushy job at The Atlantic. He knows that if he says anything controversial again he wont even get invites to the cocktail parties.
Expected of KW. Charlie’s hanging out here, now. Maybe there’s hope for him yet.
I doubt it, but one never knows. Cooke has always been pretty firm in his convictions from when I used to listen to The Editors and not very open to other points of view. I suppose if he reads enough to form his own opinion, but is he reading the member posts, or just posting?
I don’t know how much reading of Ricochet he does, but his posting is miniscule.