In some states, in an attempt to bolster its claims, True the Vote also highlighted drop box surveillance footage that showed voters depositing multiple ballots into the boxes. But that strategy wouldn’t filter out election workers who spend more time at drop boxes during the election season, cab drivers whose daily paths don’t follow a pattern, or people whose routines recently changed. True the Vote has said it filtered out people whose “pattern of life” before the election season included frequenting nonprofit and drop box locations. Delivery drivers, postal workers, cab drivers, poll workers and elected officials all have legitimate reasons to cross paths with numerous drop boxes or nonprofits in a given day. Similarly, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone might be visiting both a nonprofit’s office and one of those busy areas. What’s more, ballot drop boxes are often intentionally placed in busy areas, such as college campuses, libraries, government buildings and apartment complexes - increasing the likelihood that innocent citizens got caught in the group’s dragnet, Striegel said. “There’s always a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.” “You could use cellular evidence to say this person was in that area, but to say they were at the ballot box, you’re stretching it a lot,” said Aaron Striegel, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Plus, experts say cellphone location data, even at its most advanced, can only reliably track a smartphone within a few meters - not close enough to know whether someone actually dropped off a ballot or just walked or drove nearby. The film contains no evidence of such payments in other states in 2020. 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. 1 to Election Day, True the Vote assumed its owner was a “mule” - its name for someone engaged in an illegal ballot collection scheme in cahoots with a nonprofit. If a cellphone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. Then, by drawing a virtual boundary around a county’s ballot drop boxes and various unnamed nonprofits, it identified cellphones that repeatedly went near both ahead of the 2020 election. True the Vote has said it found some 2,000 ballot harvesters by purchasing $2 million worth of anonymized cellphone geolocation data - the “pings” that track a person’s location based on app activity - in various swing counties across five states. 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. “Ballot harvesting” is a pejorative term for dropping off completed ballots for people besides yourself. Neither responded to a request for comment. The movie was produced by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws. Praised by former President Donald Trump as exposing “great election fraud,” the movie, called “2000 Mules,” paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.īut that’s 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 film opening in hundreds of theaters across the United States this week uses a flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election nearly 18 months after it ended.
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