Georgia election officials last week issued subpoenas to obtain the identities of individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who may have engaged in the crime of ballot trafficking.
The offenses are alleged to have occurred in both the 2020 presidential election and the December 2020 U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia.
Recipients of the subpoenas are the election watchdog organization True the Vote (TTV), the groupโs founder Catherine Engelbrecht, and the research contractors that worked on the 15-month investigation into illegal vote trafficking in Georgia and a half-dozen other swing states.
โWe presented our data a year ago to Governor Kemp (a Republican) and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. They covered it up for seven months,โ alleged Engelbrecht in an April 30 television interview on Real Americaโs Voice.
โThe GBI told us they had no jurisdiction,โ Engelbrecht said.
โWe gave our data to the FBI in Atlanta. No response for seven months,โ she said.
โWe filed a full complaint with the Georgia Secretary of State in November of 2021. We heard nothing for six months. Finally, we got the subpoenas.โ
In January 2022 Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, announced that an investigation into TTVโs allegations was underway.
An investigative team from TTV used cell phone tracking, geo-fencing, and video footage to show that 242 mules collected thousands of absentee ballots from voters and made 5,668 stops at drop boxes in the metro Atlanta area in late 2020.
The data is supplemented by statements from a whistleblower who also shed light on a number of NGOs orchestrating and funding the unlawful effort.
Ballot harvesting was outlawed in Georgia in 2019.
The evidence provided by TTV is the basis of Dinesh DโDsouzaโs new movie โ2000 Mulesโ, which is scheduled to debut the first week of May at theaters nationwide and on streaming services.
Ballot trafficking is the act of a third-party intermediary, called a โmule,โ collecting an unlimited number of absentee ballots from voters and depositing them in ballot drop boxes for money.
Ballot trafficking and ballot harvesting eliminate any documented chain of custody for the ballots and the practice makes official oversight of the handling of the ballots impossible.
The elections in Georgia figure prominently in DโSouzaโs latest documentary film, but the scope of the problem of ballot trafficking affects all of the battleground states.
By Steven Kovac