2000 Mules and Refutations of The Left

Last night I watched the Dinesh D'Souza documentary 2000 Mules and was quite impressed with it.

From an integrity perspective, I think the True The Vote team did the right thing, setting the bar for judging movements of mules engaged in illegal actions very high (Criteria: A person had to have visited 10 ballot drop boxes as well as at least the location of a single non-profit stash house) and showing even that high bar would have changed the election. If they lowered the bar to say, fewer drop boxes visited, the election was a Trump rout of Biden.

I thought it was well produced. Of note to me was the attention to the production sinc conservatives have long come off as comparative amateurs when it comes to addressing people regarding issues from the media/entertainment space, which is no surprise to anyone who pays attention. And this was not only the exception, but hopefully a harbinger of things to come from conservative messaging.

For example, the intro to the documentary with the beat of the music (well chosen) and the CGI, showing a satellite streaking across space, and on the earth far below, appearing and disappearing red circles representing "geofencing" areas where data was purchased from legal commercial providers of cellular tracking information, was very well done.

It was as good as and worthy of any thriller movie produced at a higher budget that I have seen, and was impressive in that respect. (Unfortunately, this is necessary and not fluff. There are too many people who, if not hooked by a mechanism like that, don’t have the attention span to stay tuned, and will switch to something else. Sad but true.)

I also admired he logical presentation of the issue, followed by the various data elements used, layering and time synching the video evidence they obtained, how it affected the election, and ending with where they got the ballots from.

It was compelling to see the videoed reaction from the family of the elderly woman in the nursing home who has been in a mostly unresponsive state for years (according to the family sitting with her) to recount how astonished they were to find she had been voting in elections.

The led the observer along, deliberately explaining things (even some simple things they didn’t need to) which allows a wider distribution of the citizenry to follow along.

What I found in searching in Google, and visiting various links supplied there, is that the Google shaping of query results (Google was deliberately chosen, not some other engine which might return something less biased) to return to the user was very slanted. Google completely buried, obfuscated, and de-prioritized (placed on search result pages further back that might not be visited) results for me.

To anyone paying attention, this in not in the least surprising, though I suspect the vast majority of Google data consumers have no idea the returns on their queries are shaped to conform to Google's own ideological specifications.

What also was not surprising was the articles that came up at the top of the list, from Politifact, The Denver Post, The Mercury News and so on.

But what I was mildly unprepared for was the uniformity of the "rebuttals" in their language and approach, and the flat out boldfaced lies used to "debunk" Dinesh D'Souza's documentary.

In watching the documentary, one cannot deny this election fraud was widespread, targeted at key battleground states, and carried out in nearly the exact same fashion, in the same way, in the same time frame which indicates the efforts were coordinated at some level. (The pattern, repeated verbatim across the key battleground states and expressed the exact same way in the data (Non-Profit pickup points >> mules making rounds >> mules stuffing boxes with small numbers of ballots over time)

What surprised me was the uniformity of the rebuttals, all completely fallacious and having nothing to do with what was shown in the documentary, which is the surprising thing. In reading the rebuttals from various places, the similarity makes one think that not only did the source not view the documentary, but that they willfully ignored obvious and major parts of the documentary such as the key criteria they used to flag the cell phone in motion as being that of a "mule".

The Denver Post and The Mercury News: "Fact-checking “2000 Mules,” the movie alleging ballot fraud" (NOTE: both of these sites use the same AP output on this, but the key points of ignorance are):

• The group’s claims of a paid ballot harvesting scheme are supported in the film only by one unidentified whistleblower said to be from San Luis, Arizona, who said she saw people picking up what she “assumed” to be payments for ballot collection.

• “Ballot harvesting” is a pejorative term for dropping off completed ballots for people besides yourself. The practice is legal in several states but largely illegal in the states True the Vote focused on, with some exceptions for family, household members and people with disabilities.

• Alleged ballot harvesters were captured on surveillance video wearing gloves because they didn’t want to leave their fingerprints on the ballots. This is pure speculation. It ignores far more likely reasons for glove-wearing in the fall and winter of 2020 — cold weather or COVID-19.

• If it weren’t for this ballot collection scheme, former President Donald Trump would have had enough votes to win the 2020 election. This alleged scheme has not been proven, nor do these researchers have any way of knowing whether any ballots that were collected contained votes for Trump or for Biden.

PolitiFact: "The faulty premise of the ‘2,000 mules’ trailer about voting by mail in the 2020 election"

• This is their "Summary if your time is short":
  • The 2020 presidential election was secure and evidence from state and federal officials and courts shows no indication of widespread fraud. While authorities identified isolated cases of voter fraud, these instances were in such small numbers it would not have changed the election’s outcome.
    • A documentary by Dinesh D’Souza, a far-right commentator, furthers the myth that something sinister occurred with mail ballots during the 2020 election. D’Souza told Fox News that “mules” delivered 400,000 illegal votes. Experts say the evidence D’Souza points to is inherently flawed.
    • Many states have laws allowing people to return completed mail ballots on behalf of others, such as family members. Ballot drop boxes are more secure than standard mail boxes.

  • Here are some claims from the infamous "fact check" site: based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box, according to experts.
  • A video of a voter dropping off a stack of ballots at a drop box is not itself proof of any wrongdoing, since most states have legal exceptions that let people drop off ballots on behalf of family members and household members.
  • The movie is based on research by Texas-based True the Vote, a national conservative organization founded in 2010 that has spread misinformation in the past.
  • D’Souza’s argument ignores that in many states, it is legal to drop off a ballot on behalf of another voter, which is especially helpful for voters with disabilities or the elderly. Critics of this practice call it "ballot harvesting," while election administrators typically use other terms such as "ballot collection."
  • Such geospatial data is not precise enough to prove without uncertainty that a person submitted a ballot to a drop box, only that they came within a short distance of it, the Associated Press reported. There are many reasons why a person might repeatedly enter the zone where a drop box is stationed, as the boxes are often strategically placed in busy areas.