The film then describes just one case: the killing of Secoriea Turner on Jin Atlanta. "We chose to look at two murders that were ebbing on cold case status," Engelbrecht says in one scene of the film. The film suggests that True The Vote's analysis is so reliable that it helped investigate homicides. Misleading claims about a murder investigation Breitbart reported that Trump called on the crowd to "do something" about the problems allegedly exposed in the film. "We investigated, and the five ballots that he turned in were all for himself and his family members," said Raffensperger.ĭespite the criticisms, Trump has embraced "2,000 Mules." The former president even hosted a premiere event for the film at his Mar-a-Lago resort, featuring Republican politicians such as Rep. Raffensberger said they found no wrongdoing. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, said his office had already examined one instance flagged by True The Vote, in which a man delivered multiple ballots to a dropbox. So the film primarily relies on their claims about geotracking data, which D'Souza has argued are "more reliable than video footage." But, as D'Souza himself has acknowledged, the film does not show any person on camera going to multiple dropboxes. The film also features video surveillance footage of some ballot dropboxes. They allege those individuals, the "mules" of the title, were making multiple stops because they were actually stuffing the dropboxes with stacks of completed ballots - a practice that critics call "ballot harvesting." D'Souza, Engelbrecht and Phillips claim this location-tracking data show thousands of people making suspiciously large numbers of stops at mail-in vote dropboxes in the 2020 election. True The Vote said it used the data to track the movements of people in key swing states around the time of the 2020 election.
Marketers often use that kind of data for targeted advertising, and privacy advocates have raised alarms about just how much information companies are collecting and selling. Dinesh D'Souza did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.ĪP Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, testifies on Capitol Hill in 2014.Īfter the 2020 presidential election, True The Vote said it purchased a trove of geolocation data obtained from electronic devices. NPR's reporting has raised additional questions about True the Vote and the film's trustworthiness. A Washington Post analysis summarized the film's allegations as a leap of faith - "we're just asked to trust that True the Vote found what it says it found." True The Vote and D'Souza have disputed those fact-checks. It's not the only false or misleading claim that True The Vote and Dinesh D'Souza, the director behind "2,000 Mules," have made, NPR found.įact-checkers from the Associated Press and PolitiFact have examined the central voter fraud allegations in "2,000 Mules" and found that the film makes many dubious claims. In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments. I mean, they are heroes." Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media.Īuthorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021.
Trump's official spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said True The Vote "solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. Former president Donald Trump has embraced the film, which has gained popularity on the political right, along with the claim about the murder case. The claims appear in a new pro-Trump film called "2,000 Mules," which purports to have "smoking gun" evidence of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election in the form of digital device location tracking data. A conservative "election integrity" group called True The Vote has made multiple misleading or false claims about its work, NPR has found, including the suggestion that they helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Atlanta.