2000 mules: why many Americans are convinced Trump won the 2020 election

In the recent vice-presidential debate in the United States, JD Vance refused to answer a simple question. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?

It’s not surprising that he didn’t want to admit it. While vice-presidential debates are rarely consequential, he couldn’t afford to lose support from either his notoriously thin-skinned running mate, or the Republican base, and as recently as August 2024 an ABC/Ipsos poll found that only 30% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden legitimately won in 2020.

Why does this belief persist, despite a total lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud? Part of the reason is Trump himself, who tells his supporters at nearly all his rallies that the only way he can lose in 2024 is if Democrats cheat “again”, like they did in 2020. But, when pressed, a significant portion of the Republican faithful will tell you that there is, in fact, evidence that Biden stole the election – all you need to do is watch 2000 Mules.

Directed by conservative pundit and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules is a documentary that purports to show exactly how the election was rigged, through a network of left-wing non-profit organisations who “harvested” ballots and used paid operatives, or “mules”, to distribute them around multiple ballot drop boxes in battleground states.

The theory was dreamed up by Catherine Englebrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote, a right-wing group dedicated to uncovering “irregularities”, which in their view threaten the integrity of elections. While you might not know their names, you may be aware of their previous work – Trump’s 2016 claim that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” came directly from Gregg’s assertion that he had found evidence of three million “non-citizen votes”. Despite promising to release proof of this to the public, he never did. Similar unsubstantiated assertions form the backbone of 2000 Mules, but they are lent the veneer of legitimacy by the sciencey-sounding way True the Vote collected data to prove their case.

Gregg explains in the film that your phone is constantly emitting and receiving signals that include geolocation data, and apps gather that data. Sometimes that’s so that the apps can help you navigate, or help an Uber driver locate you, and other times apps will collect it so that they can show you ads relevant to your location, like if you’re close to a McDonalds, for example. The other reason they collect this data is that they can then sell it to data brokers.

True the Vote bought 10 trillion of these location data “pings” so that they could pinpoint where people had been during the election period.

In the US, mail-in ballots can be returned through regular mailboxes or by posting them in secure ballot drop boxes. True the Vote chose to focus their investigation on the five states that Trump won in 2016, and Biden won in 2020, and in each state they located each of the drop boxes and cross-checked their phone data to see who had visited those locations on multiple occasions.

Gregg and Catherine reasoned that a voter would visit a drop box when posting their own ballot, and perhaps they might find themselves near a drop box another time, but anyone who has more than a few visits starts to look suspect. They decided to set a threshold of 10 unique drop box visits and five visits to some unnamed non-profit organisations, which True the Vote theorised (for reasons never explained in the film) were being used as “stash houses” for harvested ballots; any individual who met that threshold is, by their definition, a “mule”. They use these terms because, they claim, this operation resembled drug trafficking or human trafficking, but in this case it’s ballots that are being trafficked. Using this method, they claim to have identified a little over 2,000 mules in the five states they studied.

In case the geolocation evidence doesn’t convince you that these people were up to no good, True the Vote also used Open Records requests to gather official government surveillance video of drop boxes, so that we can see the mules at work, and around 24 are shown in the film. Based on the phone data they have gathered, assuming each mule deposited an average of five ballots on each visit to a drop box, and further assuming that each of those ballots was voting for Biden, then Trump in fact won three of those five states, and enough electoral college votes to win the 2020 election.

Unfortunately for Dinesh, True the Vote, and Trump, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Not Quite

First of all, there’s no reason to make those last two assumptions. Even if we accept everything else in the film, we can’t know who the votes were for. As for the average number of ballots, based on the 17 clips they’ve included in the film where you can at least kind of see what’s going on, the average is 2.8. The most we saw from anybody was six.

More importantly, they never show us any of their geolocation data, which makes it very hard to check. However, we can check the accuracy of phone data to see if it would even be possible to use this method to prove their claims. According to the US government “GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate to within a 4.9 metre (16 foot) radius under open sky”. However, that little phrase “under open sky” is crucial. To get the best accuracy, the phone needs to have line of sight to four satellites, so it’s worse near buildings, bridges and trees.

One study from the University of Georgia found that in an urban environment the average error for a smartphone using GPS was about 10 metres and in some cases was as high as 40 metres. It’s clear that proving someone was within 5-40 metres of a drop box isn’t the same as proving that they actually posted some ballots in the box.

But what about that video evidence, surely that must prove something?

Well, no. The only video footage they have is from Georgia, where it’s completely legal to deliver ballots on behalf of family members or people in your care or custody, so showing someone posting several ballots at once isn’t proof of anything. And, despite claiming several times that they have evidence of people going to multiple drop boxes, they don’t show any video of the same person at more than one drop box, or even the same drop box on multiple occasions.

In fact, one of the featured videos, of a man posting five ballots, was investigated by the Georgia State Election Board just days before 2000 Mules was released in cinemas in the US. Investigators identified the man, checked public records, and found there were five legal electors living in his home, all family members, and using the state’s voter verification system determined that ballots for all five of the voters were dropped at the drop box in question on the date the video was taken.

Unfortunately, this was the footage Dinesh chose to play while he says, in voiceover, “What you are seeing is a crime. These are fraudulent votes.” At the end of May 2024, the film’s producers, The Salem Media Group, paid the man a significant settlement, made a public apology, and removed the film from their platforms.

But the film is still available because, while Salem backed down, Dinesh and True the Vote refused to settle and are continuing to fight the lawsuit. You can still stream it on Dinesh’s locals channel and on Rumble, and election deniers still point to it as definitive proof of fraud because they refuse to check a single claim it makes in case their beliefs are shaken.

If Trump loses to Kamala Harris in November, I’ve no doubt these same claims will be repeated, and Trump and some of his most fervent followers will remain convinced that this film holds the key to why he lost.

2000 Mules and One Big Lie: A Stubborn Conspiracy Theory, by Jim Cliff is available now in print or ebook format.