In a key scene in this year’s biggest conspiracy theory film, “2000 Mules,” tense music plays as surveillance footage shows the exterior of the Gwinnett County elections office in Lawrenceville, Georgia. A man in sweatpants and a hoodie, face blurred, exits a white Ford SUV and, one by one, deposits five ballots into a drop box on the building’s exterior, before flashing a thumbs up to a line of waiting voters and leaving the scene. “What you are seeing is a crime,” says Dinesh D’Souza, the film’s director and narrator. “These are fraudulent votes.” Except, according to Georgia authorities, the votes were completely legal. The faceless villain, one of several shown in the surveillance footage featured in “2000 Mules,” was just a normal dad. After matching his license plate to an address, investigators interviewed the man and confirmed that he was dropping off his wife and kids’ ballots, which is legal in Georgia. At a May meeting of the Georgia State Elections Board, Republican Ed Lindsey said the case was a “cautionary tale” and urged Americans to allow for investigation before jumping to conclusions. The opposite happened. By the time the elections board dismissed the case of the white SUV, video of the man and his family’s ballots had been featured on Fox News, as Tucker Carlson interviewed one of the movie’s stars and executive producers, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the Texas-based group True the Vote, a conspiracy-theory-driven right-wing group that works to ferret out supposed voter fraud. Engelbrecht and True the Vote board member Gregg Phillips, her co-star and co-executive producer, launched a nationwide press tour championing the claims in the film, which were based on imprecise cell phone location data True the Vote purchased, and which they claimed showed a vast network of ballot smugglers — mules — supposedly delivering illegal votes on behalf of unnamed left-wing organizations for $10 a pop. By June 2, the right-wing polling outfit Rasmussen said 15% of survey respondents had seen the film. Multiple Republican candidates, including two secretary of state nominees in pivotal swing states, have praised the film publicly, a HuffPost review found. And the movie has inspired groups across the country to hold stakeouts at drop boxes and to mobilize again around Donald Trump’s lie that, as the then-president said in August 2020, “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” These pronouncements may have a profound impact on the midterm elections ― not only by activating the conservative base with risible lies, but by building a mandate for these election officials to undertake serious actions against voting rights and fair elections if they make it into office. | 