Georgia election officials dispute film's voter fraud claims

ATLANTA (AP) — The Republican head of Georgia’s election board said Tuesday a recently released film alleging ballots were illegally collected and dropped off during the 2020 presidential election falsely suggests there were tens of thousands of illegitimate votes in the state.

Still, State Election Board Chairman Matt Mashburn promised a “fair” investigation of its claims.

“It’s not going to be a witch hunt,” he said at a meeting of the board. “It’s going to be done soberly and with great care by people who know what they’re doing.”

The movie, called “2000 Mules,” paints an ominous picture suggesting Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It has been praised by former President Donald Trump as exposing “great election fraud,” but election security experts say it is based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data.

Mashburn, who said he watched the film, said it suggested there were 92,000 “illegitimate, manufactured votes” in the state, but he said that's not true. Even if a ballot is illegally dropped off, it goes through the same checks as other ballots to ensure the vote is legitimate, he said.

“A ballot harvested vote might be a perfectly legal vote,” he said. “It’s just the manner of its delivery was illegal.”

The movie uses research from the Texas-based nonprofit True the Vote, which has spent months lobbying states to use its findings to change voting laws. In an email, a representative for True the Vote said the movie presented “a wide variety of information, including summary data from 5 jurisdictions in 5 states, showing only a fraction" of the...