Remember “2000 Mules”? Total Fraud, Its Organizers Admit

It was little noticed but should not be overlooked: Last month, the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote admitted to a Georgia judge that it had no evidence whatsoever to back up its claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

True the Vote had filed complaints about the integrity of the 2020 election with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, saying it had “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta". But when a Superior Court judge there ordered last year that True the Vote turn over the evidence to investigators, they refused.

Who are they and why does that matter? Because it was True the Vote that filmed voters allegedly illegally stuffing drop boxes in Georgia which was made into the film "2000 Mules" by Dinesh d'Souza, himself a convicted felon for breaking campaign contribution laws. After over 60 failures to prove fraud in court cases immediately after the 2020 election, after every story of fraudulent ballots had been explained away and proven benign, right-wing election deniers thought "2000 Mules", which even ran in theaters of red states, proved something nefarious was going on. It was proof enough for Donald Trump who, in an interview, said, "They have people stuffing the ballot boxes on tapes!"

Ironically, that the videos and the film could not by their nature serve up conclusive proof of fraud made them more powerful because they instead fed conspiracy fantasies.

True the Vote used cell phone data to find phones that between October 1 and Election Day 2020 went near a ballot drop box — any of several in a city — more than 10 times, as well as near an election-involved "nongovernmental organization” more than five times. The conjecture was that the owner of each such phone must be a “mule", applying the trafficking term for drug carriers to persons who must be dropping off fraudulent ballots, else why would they be in the vicinity of drop boxes? From such are unfounded conspiracy suspicions born.

The group says the data found 2,000 phone carriers who qualified. So the Democratic Party must have hired the unidentified 2,000 as mules to repeatedly "harvest" and drop off batches of phony ballots for Biden.

The cell phone approach is imaginative but cannot be called proof. Drop boxes are deliberately placed at busy locations that any number of vehicles, especially delivery drivers, postal workers, cab drivers, etc., may have passed by more than 10 times in the observed month. And proximity does not mean a stop at a drop box. And if anything was dropped off in some of those pass-bys, virtually none seen in the film, what is to say that what was dropped off was illegitimate — or only for Biden? The film never mentions where those ballots came from or who performed the copious task of filling in those ballots with voter-roll data and forged signatures. Not one of the mules has come forward to confess to the scheme.

A small army of debunkers went to work with relish tearing apart the claims, but of course the stolen election believers paid no attention.

Catherine Engelbrecht, a small business owner who, after volunteering in the 2008 election, found
Catherine Engelbrecht

the voting process suspect, and by making her opinions known caught the eye of the Tea Party, started True the Vote in 2009 along with frequent collaborator Gregg Phillips, a seeming entrepreneur associated with several other businesses. It has since established itself as an election watchdog but entirely in support of right-wing claims of left-wing malfeasance. Engelbrecht says the surge of mail-in voting in 2020 was part of a Marxist plot aided by billionaires including George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg.

True the Vote's complaint said its investigators “spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia” but it had only one person, referred to in the complaint only as John Doe, who “admitted to personally participating and provided specific information about the ballot trafficking process.” When called upon last year to provide that evidence, the group backtracked and tried to withdraw its complaint. But the Georgia State Election Board refused to shelve it and took True the Vote to court.

Which led to the group's surrender last month, its attorneys stating to the judge “TTV has no such documents in its possession, custody, or control.” A spokesman for Raffensperger stated,

"Once again, True the Vote has proven itself untrustworthy and unable to provide a shred of evidence for a single one of their fairy-tale allegations.”

That result will of course not get through to the 69% of Republicans and those leaning Republican who, according to a CNN poll of last August, still said Biden’s win was illegitimate.

Well, at least True the Vote was disgraced and is presumably out of business. Except it's not. They are at work in Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada to remove voters from the rolls in Democratic areas en masse — a thousand from a single Detroit suburb, for example. Their mission, they say, is to assure clean voter records because Democrats use “excess registrations” such as these to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.