If you have a relative, spouse, friend, co-worker, or neighbor who keeps pushing the film “2000 Mules” on you I’ve got the antidote to that propagandist poison.
The film is garbage. It’s not just filled with misleading information it’s poorly produced. Most of the action consists of four people sitting around a table nodding their heads in agreement on the set of a fake control room filled with blinking lights and computer screens.
The creator of the film Dinesh D’Souza acts as if he’s “just asking questions” from a group of concerned citizens who run an organization called True The Vote.
I’m just going to break this down as easily as I possibly can and empower anyone reading this to easily debunk the crazy claims of a typical MAGA voter who is convinced “2000 Mules” proves the 2020 election was stolen.
I’ve watched the film front to back three times. I cite eight sources that are all hyperlinked throughout this document. Due to copyright issues I cannot include any video clips from the film.
The Major Players
Dinesh D’Souza – He briefly worked for Ronald Regan and for various conservative think tanks. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to a campaign finance fraud violation after he used straw donors to donate in excess of the personal limit to a friend who was running for U.S. senate in NY. He was sentenced to five years in prison but was pardoned by Trump in 2018. D’Souza has a habit of saying horrible things. He’s mocked the Parkland school shooting survivors and said in a 1995 book that people born into slavery were treated “pretty well.” He’s promoted several conspiracy theories.
Gregg Phillips – He is is the former head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services and now runs a company known as OpSec. Phillips does data analysis for True The Vote. He once claimed in a tweet that three million illegal immigrants cast votes in the 2016 election. Trump immediately repeated this claim that was never verified. but could never verify. He is also an adviser to Get Georgia Right, a political action committee that received $500,000 from Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC. - NYTimes
Catherine Engelbrecht – She is the executive director of a nonprofit called True The Vote. She is quoted in The NY Times as saying, “Ms. Engelbrecht has said that the surge of mail-voting in 2020 was part of a Marxist plot, aided by billionaires including George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg, to disrupt American elections, rather than a legitimate response to the coronavirus pandemic.'“
True the Vote – A nonprofit founded in 2010 - Texas based conservative non-for-profit that is supposed to be about voter integrity but has been involved in a bunch of fraudulent claims in multiple States.
Salem Media Group – A distributor of right-wing talk radio and podcasts including one hosted by D’Souza – several Salem personalities are featured in the documentary. Salem Media spent $1.5 million to make the film and $3 million to market it.
Premise of the Core Conspiracy Theory in the Film
True the Vote spent $2 million worth of anonymized cellphone geolocation data – the pings that track a person’s location based on app activity. They purchased data for various swing counties across five states.
They designated that a person was a “mule” if their cellphone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. 1 to election day.
The filmmakers claim that 2000 so called mules were paid to illegally collect ballots and deliver them to drop boxes.
True the Vote claims ballots sent to the wrong addresses or to deceased people were filled out by nonprofits organizations who then use mules to physically deliver the ballots.
Without showing any proof or evidence, Engelbrecht insists mules are paid $10 for every fake ballot submitted in a scheme called ballot harvesting.
Geo Tracking of Cell Phone Data
Every source I researched for this project cited various experts who all insisted this type of data collection cannot pinpoint the location of anyone. The location of a cell phone or device could be off by 100 feet or more.
The technology works when an app in the device or phone basically pings its location back to the carrier. The data is often used for targeted marketing.
The filmmakers put a lot of emphasis on cell phone data that appears close to a ballot drop box but this is incredibly misleading as the boxes are intentionally placed in high traffic areas that are easy to access.
The filmmakers fill their set with screens of all kinds that feature futuristic looking digital maps that are largely for show.
A twitter account called Angry Fleas noticed that the dots on the maps that the Phillips claimed were drop boxes weren’t at the location of drop boxes. The account took images of maps from the film and superimposed them over maps of the area it was supposed to represent and they didn’t line up. In some cases they’re nowhere near where a dropbox is located.
Philips even admitted to the Washington Post, “The movie graphics are not literal interpretations of our data.”
At one point they even use a map that is described at Gwinnett county but it’s clear that there’s a river flowing through it which doesn’t exist in Atlanta. A bunch of internet sleuths identified it as Moscow, the capital of Russia.
The same map of Moscow is used again to depict another city, the filmmakers just tilted it at a 90 degree angle.
Delivery drivers, postal workers, election officials and volunteers, cab drivers, poll workers, might all show patterns that might look suspicious without additional context.
True the Vote claimed they filtered out people who showed a “pattern of life” around these drop boxes but they didn’t show how they did this.
False Claim - A Murder Case was solved using this method
The filmmakers said they helped solve a “cold case.”
An an eight-year-old named Secoria Turner on July 4, 2020 in Atlanta. Her murder remained unsolved for nearly two years. True the Vote insisted they discovered the identity of her murderers using geo tracking of cell phone data.
When multiple sources reached out to authorities involved with the case they said the cell phone data had nothing to do with finding the murders or solving the crime.
True the Vote did contact law enforcement but it was two months after they had solved the case.
The filmmakers have also said they contacted the FBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) the agency said no one from the film or True the Vote had contacted them.
An attorney for the young murder victim’s family also said no one had contacted him.
Engelbrecht responded to NPR when asked about this, “ I will not provide names of the FBI agents, as I do not want to be harassed.” I’ve had experience working with the FBI in regards to my work about the Proud Boys. The FBI does not give researchers their names, I got badge numbers instead.
Surveillance Footage
True the Vote claims they collected 4 million minutes worth of surveillance camera footage, mostly from Georgia, that proves their wild claims.
When they showed clips from video surveillance footage they didn’t verify or prove that the people in the clips matched up with their cell phone data.
What the film never shows – a person going to more than one drop box. A person going back to the same dropbox more than once.
In multiple instances reporters and election officials tracked down a couple of people featured in the video footage and found absolutely no wrongdoing. The individuals were dropping off ballots for family members. In one case it was a man dropping off ballots for himself, his wife and their four grown children.
How to Cheat with a Absentee Ballot
Expert quoted in Reuters – Paul Gronke, Elections and Voting Information Center
1. You need a falsified ballot with a unique bar code, printed on special paper, with a special envelope.
2. You need to successfully forge the voter’s signature
3. You need to deposit the envelope and have it validated by a local official
4. If you are able to do all of those three steps then you’ve committed a felony and now need to figure out how to do that thousands of times, in different jurisdictions with different ballot styles and voting materials.
The film claims as many as 400,000 ballots were collected and returned for nefarious reasons so you’d think that would lead to a lot of people who might have witnessed someone collecting ballots, or falsifying them.
Other than the two anonymous sources in the film who offer no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing absolutely no one else has come forward.
The more officials have looked into claims of voter fraud the more secure they’ve found the election. Fewer than 475 potential voter fraud cases in six states have been found out of tens of millions of ballots.
High Powered Computers
Phillips has claimed in an interview with Charlie Kirk that they used “several high-powered computers,” to analyze the data over a series of months.
He also claimed most of the work was done in Plano, Texas with part of it completed at the High Performance Computer Center on the campus of Starkville, Mississippi.
When NPR reached out to Mississippi State University where the center is located they denied working with True the Vote. The most they could find was a lease signed by Philips which shows that his office was in a separate building in the same research park.
The director of the Office of Public Affairs at the University said the office space “appeared to us to be sporadically used, if at all.”
The Antifa connection
The filmmakers make an absolutely absurd claim that the mules are also nefarious violent rioters and Antifa types based on a comparison of their data to data collected by a group ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Even Data Project).
Journalists contacted the group and they completely debunked this by saying that’s not the kind of information they collect on violent protesters so there’s no way the filmmakers could do what they said they did.
“There’s an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent prtests 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,” Phillips said in the film. “This is not grandma out walking her dog, these are, you know, violent criminals sometimes.”
ACLED told NPR both claims are categorically false.
ACLED does track violent incidents around the world, including riots, as well as peaceful protests. Their data do not include specific locations inside a city – such as neighborhood or city blocks – where protests took place. ACLED does not track the time of day of those incidents or generally not individuals participants except for high-profile leaders.
NPR got back to Engelbrecht about ACLED’s claims and dodged the question by claiming that Phillips was not actually referring to ACLED. She used the term “multiple databases” instead.
D’Souza has also cited ACLED as a source for this claim. He would not respond to NPR’s question about it.
Evidence that Wasn’t Evidence
True the Vote pointed to footage of people wearing latex gloves when they dropped off ballots – proof they claimed that people were trying to hide their fingerprints. – it was in the middle of a peak COVID-19 outbreak which might explain why some folks might wear gloves when touching a drop box used by thousands of people.
They showed footage of one man taking a photograph of the ballot drop box after he deposited ballots – people do the same thing when they vote, that really means nothing.
Several examples showed people dropping off ballots late at night or in the early morning hours - this is proof of nothing other than a voter might work a night shift or a job with odd hours.
The footage doesn’t actually show any illegal activity.
The filmmakers never show anyone drop off a large amount of ballots.
The footage never includes the same person going back to a ballot drop box.
It also does not include an individual going to more than one drop box.
In one clip Pennsylvania County authorities debunked a clip by confirming it showed a designated agent dropping ballots off on behalf of individuals who are unable to do it themselves.
Insane Claim
If not for these specific mules and the ballots they dropped off Trump would have won the election. – they basically make up numbers based on their dubious cell phone data.
Fox News reaction to the film
Trump and D’Souza have complained that Fox News won’t promote the film but Tucker Carlson had Englebrecht on as a guest. She talked at length about the main theory in the film without mentioning D’Souza or the film itself.
Trump is of course in love with the film and said on Gab.com “Fox News is no longer Fox News. They won’t even show or discuss the greatest and most impactful documentary of our time, ‘2000 Mules.” The Radical Left Democrats are thrilled – They don’t want the TRUTH to get out.”
After the results of the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign filed dozens of lawsuits in multiple states alleging voter fraud, nearly all of them have been denied, dismissed or withdrawn.
Sources
FACT FOCUS: Gaping holes in the claims of 2K Mules - AP
Fact Check-Does ‘2000 Mules’ provide evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election? - Reuters
Even the geolocation maps in ‘2000 Mules’ are misleading - Washington Post
The faulty premise of the ‘2,000 mules’ trailer about voting by mail in the 2020 election - Politifact
A pro-Trump film suggests its data are so accurate, it solved a murder. That's false - NPR
A Big Lie in a New Package - NY Times
Trump rails against Fox News, saying the network hasn't aired a movie alleging widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election - Business Insider
The Yuma sheriff isn’t investigating election fraud because of ‘2000 Mules’ - AZ Mirror
It's amazing how much of this garbage links back to the CNP. Stuart W. Epperson is co-founder and chairman of Salem Media Group, and a member of the conservative Council for National Policy ("CNP") Another Salem media exec and CNP guy is J. Keet Lewis, Russel Ramsland's partner at ASOG. These are some very sus actors https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/trump-election-fraud-texas-businessman-ramsland-asog/