A 2020 presidential ballot featuring President Donald J. Trump against Joe Biden (Photo by Joe Kovacs)
Critics of the True the Vote investigation of alleged ballot trafficking featured in the film "2000 Mules" point to an Associated Press fact-check article as reason to dismiss claims that surveillance video footage of drop boxes and cellphone location data provide evidence of an organized scheme that delivered enough fraudulent mail-in ballots to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The AP's May 3 story charged True the Vote conducted a "flawed analysis" of the data.
True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht teamed with data analyst and election intelligence expert Gregg Phillips in a lengthy probe in which researchers tediously combed through two petabytes of data. As Engelbrecht told WND in a video interview (video below), they uncovered a highly coordinated operation in key battleground states carried out by left-wing groups that collected mail-in ballots and paid "mules" to stuff them in unattended drop boxes, typically in the middle of the night.
The AP's primary claim was that the cellphone location data is not precise enough to determine whether or not an individual actually visited a particular drop box. Innocent people, the news wire contended, may have been caught up in their data.
However, as Wendi Strauch Mahoney of UncoverDC reports, Engelbrecht and Phillips took that issue and many others brought up by the AP into account when they designed their investigation.
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In a 2018 opinion in the Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that when the government "tracks the location of a cell phone," it "achieves near perfect surveillance as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user."
And Engelbrecht points out in the movie that the data in Georgia was used by law enforcement as a test case to help law enforcement solve a cold murder case of a young girl.
Engelbrecht noted that the criteria they used to identify a person as a ballot trafficker was intended to rule out individuals who might merely have been passing by. The person not only had to have made multiple trips to multiple drop boxes, he or she also had to have made at least five visits to one or more of the non-profit, left-wing organizations that turned out to be a nexus of ballot traffic.
In Atlanta, the researchers identified 242 people who went to an average of 24 drop boxes and eight organizations during a two-week period.
"We want to absolutely ensure that we don't have false positives, meaning including people that should not have been included," said Phillips. "We're not in any way saying that this is all there is."
The AP quoted Pennsylvania state Sen. Sharif Street claiming that he was "confident he was counted as several of the 1,155 anonymous 'mules,' even though he didn't deposit anything into a dropbox at that time period."
Engelbrecht said the senator would be in their study only if he was going back and forth between NGOs and drop boxes, and did it more than 10 times. And driving by would not be enough. To be in the study, the person had to get out of the car and walk up to the drop box.
The AP also challenged the claim that the data show violent Antifa rioters were among the mules.
"There were several different violent BLM Antifa riots in Atlanta, and in one of them, we had three dozen of our mules participate in these violent riots," Phillips said. "There's an organization that tracks the device IDs. Across all violent protests around the world, we took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta, and sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases."
The reference is to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a non-profit that "collects the dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world."
The AP story contends Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office investigated one of the surveillance videos circulated by True the Vote and found that the man was dropping off ballots for himself and his family.
However, Engelbrecht told UncoverDC that while True the Vote has offered copies of the video surveillance to the secretary of state, Raffensperger does not have the footage.
"They only have geospatial data. The GBI already has access to all the video because it's a state video," she said. "We went through everything and offered to provide video, but until the subpoenas, they've never indicated what or how they wanted to receive info, and we didn’t want to do anything incorrectly. That's how I am certain the comment about the Raffensperger having our video is inaccurate."
The AP said the wearing of gloves to avoid fingerprints is "pure speculation." However, after news reports of fingerprint evidence in a ballot trafficking case in Arizona, suspected traffickers were seen in videos wearing surgical gloves while depositing ballots in the middle of the night.
The AP maintains all is well with absentee ballots concerning signature verification. However there were reported issues in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia with signature verification. According to Engelbrecht, in Georgia more than 75,000 votes came from ineligible voters in the November 2020 election and more than 46,000 in the Senate runoffs in January 2021.
To the overall claim by the AP that there was no massive ballot collection scheme, Engelbrecht explained the operation seemed to have been designed to have many mules delivering small numbers of ballots to avoid surges in ballot drops that would raise a flag.
At the end of the documentary, D'Souza asks Engelbrecht and Phillips if the data shows crimes occurred that affected the outcome of the election.
Phillips replied that with "the lower bar of five dropbox visits and just three illegal ballots per drop, we find election fraud on an astonishing scale in Wisconsin, 83,565 illegal votes were trafficked in Wisconsin, in Georgia 92,670. In Pennsylvania, 209,505. In Michigan, 226,590, and Arizona, 207,435."
"Using this calculus," he said, "Trump would have won all the key states and the final electoral vote 305 to 233."
Some 4 million minutes of video reveals "an organized effort to subvert a free and fair election," Phillips continued.
"This is organized crime. You can’t look at this data in its aggregate and believe anything otherwise."
D'Souza said in a video interview with WND (embedded below) last week that the investigation featured in the movie will "blow out of the water" the idea that the 2020 vote was the most secure election ever.
"No one who sees this movie will be able to listen to that with a straight face," he said.
D'Souza emphasized "this is evidence of a completely different caliber than anything we've seen before."
See the WND interview with Dinesh D'Souza:
Last week, Georgia state investigators who responded to a complaint by True the Vote issued subpoenas that signal they are engaged in a wide-ranging probe into the alleged ballot trafficking, Just the News reported.
See the WND interview with Catherine Engelbrecht:
See a trailer for the film "2000 Mules":
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The post '2000 Mules,' True the Vote respond to AP fact-check appeared first on WND.
