Voter Integrity Group Concludes Up to 4.8 Million Ballots Cast Illegally in 2020 Harvesting Scheme
UPDATE, June 3, 2024: On May 31, Salem Media Group, the publisher of “2000 Mules,” announced it had removed the film from its platforms and apologized to a Georgia man who was shown in the film putting ballots into a drop box. Given that fact, an embedded clip of that scene has been removed from this article and the feature image has been revised.
UPDATE, May 4, 2022: Politifact published an article citing several academics and reported experts who dispute some of the claims made by True the Vote and “2,000 Mules.” Readers interested in this additional information can find that article here.
The election integrity group True the Vote calculates that approximately 4.8 million votes were cast as part of an alleged illegal ballot harvesting scheme in key swing states in the 2020 general election.
The organization worked with conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza on the soon-to-be-released documentary “2,000 Mules.”
True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht told Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, that the convergence of dirty voter rolls, mass mail-in ballots, changes to voting procedures, drop boxes and private money funding election processes created an environment where fraud could run rampant.
Gregg Phillips of True the Vote said the group began getting tips on its hotline from states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona in the fall of 2020.
From those tips, a common pattern began to emerge of a ballot harvesting scheme.
“The theme almost always was a set of collectors, a collection point or a stash house for all the ballots, the bundling of those ballots and the casting of those ballots by what we were calling mules in the drop boxes,” Phillips told Kirk.
“This is a conspiracy.”
Everywhere they followed the same playbook:
Set of collectors, use NGOs as stash houses, bundle ballots, then cast them in drop boxes by mules pic.twitter.com/fo9tghk4ij
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 11, 2022
“It was amazing once we finally started to unpack the true grift. As you said, this is a conspiracy. This is organized crime,” Phillips added.
Engelbrecht and Phillips recounted how they developed a plan to test whether what they were hearing through the tip line was true. It involved buying cellphone data in metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit, as well as in Yuma County, Arizona.
They explained that all cellphones have unique device information that pings off cellphone towers, showing where the cellphone has been down to an 18-inch diameter. This technology is used by thousands of phone apps, such as those for weather and navigation.
Law enforcement employs this technology all the time. The FBI, in fact, used it to pinpoint protesters who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The New York Times reported that it paid for cell data to track down those who were present at the Capitol that day.
True the Vote said they mined data from the months leading up to the 2020 election to identify 2,000 of the most prolific “mules” who engaged in ballot harvesting.
The mules followed a pattern of repeatedly going to drop box locations and back to offices of non-governmental organizations during the election in places like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Yuma, Arizona, the group said.
THE MOST SECURE ELECTION IN HISTORY
Here’s a woman stuffing the ballot box in broad daylight in Gwinnett County, Georgia in the November 2020 Election pic.twitter.com/sqUfuONfGP
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 11, 2022
“We were able to identify those organizations, those stash houses,” Phillips said. “In Philadelphia, we had some people, quite a few people, who went over 100 times to the drop boxes. But they were also going to the organizations.”
In Philly, some mules made hundreds of trips to drop boxes pic.twitter.com/juXS1s9SLO
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 11, 2022
Philadelphia was the worst of the places tracked where alleged illegal ballot harvesting occurred, according to Phillips. He said 1,155 people there met their definition of a mule, going to drop boxes at least 10 times.
Engelbrecht said the average number of trips per mule in Yuma County was 31.
To guard against accidentally picking up people who happened to pass by drop box locations regularly, True the Vote bought cellphone data for September, October and November, showing before, during and after election season.
Only those whose cellphones showed them at drop boxes when voting was occurring were included in True the Vote’s data.
“Pings don’t lie,” Engelbrecht said.
She noted that True the Vote’s analysis of cellphone data only included drop boxes, not mailboxes. So what the group unearthed is “just the tip of the iceberg,” she said.
When Kirk asked if this illegal ballot harvesting activity was enough to swing an election, both Phillips and Engelbrecht responded, “Yes.”
“The number breaks out to about 7 percent of the mail-in ballots, and that holds state-to-state,” Engelbrecht said.
The five swing states they looked at — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — went for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 after siding with Donald Trump in 2016.
“It’s 4.8 million votes,” Engelbrecht added.
A version of this article originally appeared on Patriot Project.
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