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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 think you mean they’re uninterested in doing their jobs, not disinterested. There is a difference.
Not really, to truly audit an election, you need to be able to tie a ballot to a person to determine that their vote was cast correctly. In theory, once could use a public-private key pair to encrypt the ballot ID using the voters public key and they could use their private key to decrypt the ballot to view it, but that only allows for a determination by the voter that their ballot is what they wanted. For an audit to work, as the independent auditor I need to be able to see that ballot (decrypted), tied to a voter so that I can verify with that voter that their ballot matches. Sure we could use some key pairs, though that means that each voter will need a set of keys used as part of the voting process, but even after all that, unless the auditor can SEE the decrypted ballot tied to a user, the encryption is a black box that no one really knows if its working.
As for party affiliation, not sure about other States, but in Texas it only means what primary you chose to vote in during the primary. That, much like that you voted has to be public record to prevent people from voting in multiple primaries/elections. I suppose they could allow for an opt out for voters, but the only real result from that would be fewer political mailings, and that would mean more money being spent on ads instead. Ugh.
This is pretty much what I think. What bothers me is that almost every GOP official and pundit seems to be at 1 and a small few might be closing in on 2.
It is possible to say “this ballot was a mailed/absentee ballot” and have that count correspond to a count of envelopes. It is also possible to preserve envelopes as part of an audit trail. It is also possible to keep mail ballots in small batches so if x% of envelopes in a batch are fraudulent, that batch can be removed without threatening all mailed in ballots and still preserve anonymity.
If your mail in ballots are higher than the number of envelopes in that batch, the entire batch is suspect and open to adjudication and dispute, subject to removal from vote totals.
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I’m going to quibble with you slightly. While I haven’t bothered to check actual Congressional votes, I wouldn’t doubt that the Democrats vote more in lock-step than Republicans do, but not by a drastic margin. For instance, they can never get democrats to unify on gun control measures or legalizing drugs.
During the entire first year-and-a-half of the Biden administration, they have been beleaguered constantly by Senators Joe Manchin and Kristin Sinema who will not acquiesce to the radical agendas. These two senators have been a bigger stumbling block for the Democrats than John McCain was to the Republicans. It’s kind of fun watching the Dems carp and kvetch about it while we have the McCain fiasco behind us.
And they don’t need to be in lock-step over everything. When the Dims have a sizeable majority to do something, they’re fine with letting a few vote the other way if it helps with those peoples’ re-election campaigns etc. Just so they remember to toe (not tow, people!) the line when it’s needed.
Yes, mail in ballots are always (well I can only speak with direct knowledge of Texas) kept separate. The issue is as follows. In Texas (and most States), the election clerk has to provide the voter with the ballot and two envelopes. One is the Ballot Envelope and the second is the Carrier Envelope. The Carrier envelope is what is mailed and requires a stamp (because pre-paid mail is not postmarked and thus you don’t know when it was received by the post office).
The voter marks their ballot by themselves (if they are eligible to get assistance at the poll, they can get that at home but the person dong so much sign the oath of assistance). They then place the ballot into the Ballot Envelope and seal that envelope. The Ballot Envelop has a place for the voter to write their name, ID number (Drivers License, Voter ID, or other state issues ID number). The sealed Ballot Envelope is then placed in the Carrier Envelope where the voter then signs the affirmation that they are the person who completed the ballot. The Carrier Envelope is then mailed back to the election clerk, or delivered by hand.
Only the voter can take the Carrier Envelope and then drop it in the mail or at the elections office. If anyone else does this, they are required to list their name, address, and signature on the exterior of the Carrier Envelope. The exception for that requirement is for family and roommates from the Election Code “the second degree by affinity or the third degree by consanguinity” for family, or “was physically living in the same dwelling as the voter at the time of the event”
It is against the law to pay anyone to deliver a ballot to the mail or clerk’s office. Each Carrier Envelop has to be mailed separately, except that a single residence can mail them back all together.
What happens next? Look to the next comment…
Once the election clerk receives the ballot (only in Texas where I know the Election Code a bit), the following happens:
Why all the rules, trying to disenfranchise minorites etc? Let a million – no, a BILLION! – ballots flow!
Not so sure about that. McCain was a pretty big stumbling block, and the fact that he saved Obamacare because he hated Trump and Trump voters will always put him high on the list of backstabbers.
The fact-checkers are loyal servants of a narrative. If the narrative is right, they might help us see why. If the narrative is wrong, they’ll help us learn the truth by representing an untruth–like the lawyer in court who defends the guilty party.
The one thing they won’t do is follow the evidence where it leads.
It’s a pain for Texas absentee voters. The instructions are not all written in the same place, and they’re ambiguous. I never know for sure if I’m mailing my ballot consistently with their instructions, and never sure if it matters.
In order to use the carrier envelope properly I would have to learn how to print envelopes; Heaven only knows what suffering would be wrought by a rebellious printer or an envelope of non-standard size purchased overseas. Fortunately, I normally end up concluding that the instructions say the carrier envelope is not required as long as I follow various other instructions and send it by mail in time.
This is where I am at as well.
The system is designed to make it more secure as opposed to easier for the voter, that trade-off seems good to me since mail voting is inherently less secure than in-person voting.
The Texas Election Code actually lays out that the election clerk is required to provide the Ballot Envelope and the Carrier Envelope to the voter. The voter MAY put all of that in another envelope to hide the info on the Carrier Envelope or to batch ballots from a single address.
Compare this to, say, California where campaigns can pay people to pick up and deliver ballots by mail, or CO or OR where almost (or all) votes are by mail. They do a decent job of automating the process, but can never overcome the inherent drawbacks of voting by mail.
Ooh, well said!
This is waaaaay too generous an assessment imo. The media is treasonous, not lazy or inept. Their keeping the public in the dark and/or promoting the Left’s narrative is intentional and takes effort and skill.
Except it’s not. It’s designed to be completely unsecured; mission accomplished.
I can only speak to Texas’ system, and it is designed to be about as secure as any mail voting system can be. You only get a ballot if you request it. You have to complete the paperwork correctly and return the ballot in a timely manner. The personal info and signature must match the application. You have to include a photocopy of your ID that was used to register. All of that is validated before the ballot is opened.
Now, there is no way to know that the person actually filled out that ballot, and it seems every few elections they catch someone who has been cheating by registering nursing home patients and voting them, but its about as valid as it can be.
If I had my druthers, I would only allow in-person voting (election day or early) with exceptions only for invalids, and people who are not in the county on election day(s). That is how Texas sets things up, and as a result the number of mail ballots is relatively small. In the March 1 2022 primary there were 198,947 ballots by mail. The total votes was 1,954,172 in the GOP Primary and 1,075,601 in the Dem Primary for a total of 3,029,773 or a vote by mail rate of 6.5% which is way high for my mind, but compared to CA where that rate is approaching 75% and OR where it is 100%. I was trying to look at the historical data for mail voting in Texas (pre-pandemic), but the SOS site just doesn’t have the data published easily. I wanted to see what the vote by mail rates were prior to 2020 to compare to the current rate.
I’ve been mailing my vote from Asia since 2012, and they’ve never told me to do that.
You know, since the accusations about the origins, sponsors and uses of Dominion voting machines, I’ve wondered if they (and every form of voting subversion) hasn’t been going on for decades in US elections, particularly in States that are ostensibly heavily Democrat controlled. And now I read about the craziness in Washington State, and that it’s had mail-in voting for decades and has always worked and been considered “safe and secure”.
And I’ve wondered if, say, half the population is leftist and content with the Democrat results, and the other half just says to itself, Yeah this is a leftist state and so we can expect that a strong majority of the people (people on the west coast population centers) have spoken with their votes and this is what we are getting — and they’ve just come to expect that (1) voting is above board, (2) voting results in Democrats winning and controlling more and more of governmental functions, and (3) this represents the will of the voting public. Like the pr0verbial frog that gets boiled.
Is there any evidence, has their been any voting integrity research, that indicates that voting in Washington State has been effectually honest?
To say nothing of California. How could Gruesome Newsom win his recall?
Oh gosh, there were ballots all over the freaking place.
Because conservative Larry Elder was leading the replacement vote.
I suspect you find plenty of scholarship by Democrats for Democrats showing how fair Democrat wins are. If any of it is real or trustworthy is a different question. They most likely will give research grants only to those they can trust to provide the correct results
I’m not convinced there was anything wrong with the Dominion voting machines. Dominion was not afraid to file multiple law suits against people and organizations who claimed the machines were either defective or spitting out tainted results. Hence, they are not afraid of subjecting their machines to court scrutiny and being subjected to hostile depositions by opposing lawyers. One of the most vocal proponents of the voting machine fraud allegations was lawyer Sidney Powell, who upon being served notice of a law suit said in public:
“Analyzed under these factors, and even assuming, arguendo, that each of the statements alleged in the complaint could be proved true or false, no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”
She completely disavowed herself of her own statements! That’s a dodge worthy of the most far leftists and she was supposed to be advising the Trump team.
And to think that half the population doesn’t care if voting machines have been accurate all along is stretching things. We had huge fights over voting machines during the 2004 re-election of George Bush. I even talked about it with the head of Diebold Inc., who manufactured the voting machines in question. The guy wasn’t the least bit fazed by allegations of fraud, though later analysis showed the machines were indeed flawed.
The only credible theory that I have seen about widespread voter fraud large enough to turn the 2020 election involves the abuse of mail-in ballots as being proposed by 2,000 Mules.
I heard some claims that could have been proved one way or another if the code was available for inspection. Other claims about “weighting” that was supposedly documented in the equivalent of a user’s manual were made. When no actual documentation or screen shots of the user’s manual showed up, I decided that Sydney Powell was an attention-seeking liar.
It would be impossible to audit the Dominion machines AS THEY WERE for the 2020 election. And Dominion probably knows it.
I doubt there’s been any research. Why raise a troubling question only to answer it falsely? No, they’d most likely just keep their eyes averted.
But it’s possible, even if it’s unlikely, so that’s why I wanted to know.