Fact-check: 100ft and ballot mules
100ft is enough to locate within the Capitol, but not near an election drop box
The movie “2000 Mules” claims phone GPS data is improbably accurate. Techies have been debunking the movie, claiming that phone geolocation is inaccurate enough to cause false-positives, that people simply driving by can sometimes get caught in the data. Nonetheless, D’Souza continues to defend his claims — not with technical data substantiating his claims, but with snark. Here is his latest tweet:
The case in question is that of that of Anthony Robert Williams.
The accuracy of phone geolocation is within about 100 feet. So let’s plot that on Google maps. Below is the picture of the US Capitol, with a circle of one location where Anthony Robert Williams is accused to have been (the rotunda).
The circle has a 100ft radius. As you can see, this is easily accurate enough to place him inside the building. Nobody driving by will get caught within this circle. People standing outside the building will not generate a false-positive. Sure, standing within 100 ft of the building could show a “ping” just inside, but not in the center of the building where Williams was accused of being.
Now let’s look at a typical dropbox from the 2020 election. This map shows the one nearest me. The circle is centered on where the dropbox was precisely located:
As you can see, 100ft will certainly catch people driving by. This confirms techies debunking of the film that 100ft isn’t accurate enough to prevent false positives from people passing by the building.
This is especially the case because Mt Vernon Hwy is a major cross street and gets traffic jams in the morning and evening. People can stop and wait for several minutes in the street. Thus, algorithms designed to filter out people “driving buy” will still see people stop for a few minutes in front of the dropbox.
This will also catch deliveries, inter-library exchanges, or even party volunteers setting up lawn signs nearby (there’s a forest of them every election, since this is an elections place).
Where do I get the 100ft number? I couldn’t find it in Williams case, but other cases cite it. This case is a good example:
Even without this confirmation, it’s simply a well-known technical fact known by techies. GPS location can be accurate, but phones in people’s pockets fail to reach that potential.
Note that Google says that in general, it’s app is more accurate, that 68% of the time it’ll do much better than 100ft. So it doesn’t mean every GPS record is that inaccurate. So not everybody driving by will trigger a false-positive — but enough will. Anybody can confirm the accuracy for themselves. Keep checking Google Maps as you go about your daily life. You’ll see that 68% of the time it’s accurate all the time, and widely off another third of the time.
So the above tweet is thorough debunked, with pictures. The expected accuracy is to within about 100 feet, and this is enough to geolocate somebody within the Capitol, but not good enough to guarantee there are no false positives within the data claimed in “2000 Mules”.
What really debunks the film is simply that they refuse to make the data public, that we have to take their word for it. The fact that D’Souza mispresents how GPS works just gives us even more reason not to believe their claims without data substantiating their claims.
The fact they refuse to make the data public should not be your last paragraph. You really should make that stand out more prominently. Verifying data is important.