Trump propagandist Dinesh D'Souza is back with his latest "film", the subject this time being Trumpist fan fiction about how "Democrats stole the election" through illegally "stuffing ballot drop boxes" and his "proof" is just as shoddy as his premise.
“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.
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. 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.
If a cellphone went near a drop box more than 10 times and a nonprofit more than five times from Oct. 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.
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. The film contains no evidence of such payments in other states in 2020.
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.
“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. “There’s always a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.”
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.
Similarly, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone might be visiting both a nonprofit’s office and one of those busy areas. 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.
True the Vote has said it filtered out people whose “pattern of life” before the election season included frequenting nonprofit and drop box locations. 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.
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. However, there was no way to tell whether those voters were the same people as the ones whose cellphones were anonymously tracked.
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.
For example, Larry Campbell, a voter in Michigan who was not featured in the film, told The Associated Press he legally dropped off six ballots in a local drop box in 2020 — one for himself, his wife, and his four adult children. And in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office investigated one of the surveillance videos circulated by True the Vote and said it found the man was dropping off ballots for himself and his family.
And of course the follow-up is that the information about people whose cell phones were being tracked will be given to law enforcement to "investigate" these obscene claims, if they haven't been already. I haven't hard of anyone actually being arrested for, you know, voting...other than Republican megadonors who deliberately tried to commit mass voter fraud or GOP voters who tried to do it on a smaller scale in state after state after state.
You won't see any of those folks in D'Souza's "film".
It's all 100% lies and they know it.
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