Aficionados of the television show The X Files will recall the mantra most commonly attributed to FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder as he investigated paranormal phenomenon and other strange doings with the assistance of Physicist Dana Scully – the truth is out there. “The quote does pop up from time to time and is actually said by members of the cast at certain times. However, most viewers remember the quote as the tagline from the show as seen during the opening credits of each episode.” What does it mean? “(T)he things that we believe to be fact right this very moment may turn out to be wrong once we discover the truth on how something actually works. We shouldn’t be complacent and be confident in what we currently know. We should always be searching for knowledge”
Election integrity is one area where the quest for the facts must be a constant and on-going search for knowledge. This is particularly relevant in regards to the questions which continue to surround the Presidential election of 2020.
According to an ABC News Poll from January of 2022, “America’s faith in the integrity of the election system remains shaken…with only 20% of the public saying it’s very confident about the system…(t)he lack of strong confidence in the country’s ability to conduct an honest election crosses partisan lines. Among Democrats…(only) 30% say they are very confident in the U.S. election systems overall. Regarding independents, only 1 in 5 consider themselves ‘very confident’ in the nation’s elections. Even fewer Republicans (13%) are very confident, with a considerable majority (59%) having little faith in the system, responding that they either are ‘not so confident’ or ‘not confident at all…'”
Though ABC News linked this lack of confidence to the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021, even ABC had to admit that “large shares of Republicans felt that Joe Biden’s election was not legitimate alongside feelings that those present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 may have been attempting to protect democracy, rather than threaten it.” How to explain this belief among Republicans that something underhanded occurred in the 2020 election? According to political scientist William Howell, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, “(w)idespread distrust in our electoral system overlays deep divisions over our democracy. Republicans lack confidence, in no small part, because of lies propagated by their leaders. And Democrats lack confidence because of ongoing efforts of Republicans to politicize the administration of elections. This is a bad equilibrium.”
So that’s the answer – Republicans are being misled! There was no election fraud during the 2020 Presidential election! After all, shortly after the results were announced, “members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council...and others called the 2020 election the ‘most secure in American history’…(t)he statement from the agencies said ‘there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.'” That should put an end to the issue, shouldn’t it?
And yet, despite these definitive statements from the experts, there are those who continue to have no confidence in the official position. One of those is the filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.
“A tactic of mass fraud was used in the 2020 presidential elections, where alleged paid couriers, called ‘mules,’ were traveling to various nonprofit groups and ballot drop boxes across county lines to stuff illegal ballots. This is the conclusion of a new documentary, 2000 Mules, from filmmaker and author Dinesh D’Souza, and supported by surveillance footage, massive amounts of data, and whistleblowers who agreed to go on camera….’We’re talking about very significant fraud…if you subtract the fraud from the Biden column, you begin to see Biden states moving into the Trump camp,’ D’Souza said.”
In his latest film, D’Souza explores the method used to stuff absentee ballot boxes with thousands of ballots of questionable legality. “True The Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and 30-year election intelligence expert Greg Phillips… analyzed more than a petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of data from smartphones in Phoenix, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Las Vegas, covering the time period from October 1 through Election Day (and through January 6 in Georgia to cover the Senate runoff). In Atlanta, the group says that by using that data, they identified 242 ‘mules’ who met their criteria (visited 10 different ballot drop boxes and at least five different nonprofit organizations identified as ‘stash houses’) during that time frame.”
In coordination with the cellphone data, Engelbrecht and Phillips secured hundreds of hours of surveillance video for various ballot drop boxes. D’Souza’s movie makes use of these videos, revealing footage of people placing multiple ballots in drop boxes, some in the early morning hours, one even wearing surgical gloves (which she discards immediately after dropping off her ballots), and in some cases, taking photos of the drop box.
According to True the Vote, “(w)e do have video showing the same person at multiple drop boxes. Some of that footage was shown in the first trailer. It was taken out because the video is extremely poor quality. We address this issue in the film. Most jurisdictions had no video or if they did, it was (illegally) destroyed. Of what does exist, 85% of it is bad; the camera poorly positioned, out of focus, the video compiled out of chronological sequence, inexplicably missing blocks of days and times. This is why the geospatial evidence is the key. One thing this exercise proved to us is that drop box surveillance video was never monitored, as voters expected it would be. Like so many other election processes, it was a false promise of security.”
It didn’t take long for the attacks on D’Souza’s work to begin. “2000 Mules is Plandemic for election truthers. For the non-insane, it’s a hilarious mockumentary,” writes Amanda Carpenter in The Bulwark. “(A)n investigative documentary in roughly the same way Reno 911 was a hard-hitting look at real-life police work…(i)t’s better to view the film as a performance piece, a comedic triumph where the joke is on the rubes gullible enough to give D’Souza their money.”
More serious efforts at debunking the information detailed in 2000 Mules are contained in various “fact check” articles. “Politifact and (the) Associated Press led the charge, and many outlets ran the AP’s flawed and amateurish report, magnifying its reach. Of course, as RedState noted, the PolitiFact and AP pieces are nearly identical, almost as if they were coordinated… the hit pieces published by the mainstream media were not intended to find the truth but only to discredit the shocking findings presented in the film…”
For instance,”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’salways a pretty healthy amount of uncertainty that comes with this.'”
But, according to True the Vote, “(t)hat’s simply not true. In the first sentence of the quote, the writer says that experts say that a smartphone can be reliably tracked within a few meters. Depending on what ‘a few’ means in this case, that could be six or nine feet. That’s hardly leaving a healthy amount of uncertainty. Also, we’re not just talking about one visit to a ballot box.”
Ironically, “(p)ieces in the Washington Post and the New York Times also characterize cellphone location data as quite specific and reliable. For example,(a) May 4 WaPo article stok(ed) fear that the Patriarchy could use phone data to determine who got an abortion should abortion become illegal in some states. The New York Times also admitted in a recent report that federal agents used geo-tracking to identify the protesters attending the January 6 protests in Washington DC. So the media is well aware of the usefulness and capability of geo-tracking. Their own reports explain and promote the technology.”
Rather than listen to “fact checkers,” see 2000 Mules. Then decide for yourself. The truth remains out there.
Judge John Wilson (ret.) served on the bench in NYC