did you see the circular reasoning there?

No. Both factors, increase in population and high voter turnout, can independently lead to higher votes for candidates.

I suppose if one defines “high voter turnout” as an absolute number it might appear circular. I mean it in what I suspect is the more usual meaning of a high fraction of the population or of possible voters.

Objectively, do you believe Pedo Joe, who didn’t even campaign for president, received more legitimate votes than any presidential candidate ever?

There was extremely high turnout in this election and there has been a population increase, so yes, I think it is entirely plausible that both candidates received more votes than any prior presidential candidate.

So I watched it the other day on the plane. I can't say it is complete hogwash so no free beer for me    I will first give my overall impression then some more detailed criticism focused on study quality and specific statements made.

Overall I think they show by clear evidence that there was some illegal ballot harvesting. The argument that it would have affected the outcome of the election is perhaps suggestive, but not much stronger. They make a number of clearly unwarranted and hyperbolic claims.

More specifically:

The argument that illegal ballot harvesting was widespread is quite weak. They demonstrate a few examples that really look like that is what was going on. But they do not state that how often they observed this as a fraction of the total or total number of times. They do not even attempt to estimate that fraction with random sampling of their dataset.

The argument that payments were made for this harvesting in general way is almost non-existent. There are a few examples where it sure looks like the people dropping the ballots are attempting to cover their tracks and one or two interviews, but no substantial proof of this in a broad way is adduced.

The argument that this would have affected the election is quite weak because of the lack of some obvious checks. They targeted what they said were far left non-profits. OK, but what would happen if you targeted similar right wing groups. Maybe this sort of thing was happening on both sides. They could have easily performed this type of analysis with their dataset but failed to do so.

Here is an example of a very hyperbolic claim made in the video - "Know for a fact that there was coordinated systematic fraud" (at ~46:34). My goodness, there is perhaps some evidence that some fraud went on, but hardly anything approaching reasonable evidence for this strong claim. Quite honestly, the fact that they would think this is an appropriate claim based on this evidence and that the people they were interviewing endorsed that seriously impugns the reasoning employed in terms of objective investigation.

Those are my comments from an objective analysis point of view. I will be gone for the next week and one half, so likely will not respond further until I return.

You can order a DVD on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/2000-Mules-Documentary-Dinesh-DSouza/dp/B09YPJQLHZ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=2000+mules&qid=1654554970&sr=8-1

Thanks. Unfortunately that has a longer delivery and no DVD drive in my laptop. Any pointers to some online version downloadable version?

You might just want to make an exception for this video.  I share your frustration with how slow videos can be, but there's a lot of pretty credible information packed into that one.  Unless they are actors and the whole thing is scripted fiction, which I don't buy for a second, it's hard not to give credence to their conclusions.

I may just make an exception based on recommendations here. However, if I spend the time on it and conclude it is a bunch of hogwash, I will expect a case of my favorite beer - Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

I do think that if one is concerned about distortion of the outcome in the last election, that the mail in ballots are a much bigger concern. This clearly alters the type of person voting and may well have changed the outcome of the last presidential election.

Personally I am all for having in person voting only on Election Day.

I would need to see an objective examination of the actual data to draw any real conclusions from this. It is far too easy to make things appear in a distorted way in a video.

The criminal investigation in Arizona involved a tiny city near Yuma and a conviction of a woman for turning in 4 ballots which did not belong to her or her family. So I don’t regard that as some great vindication of the contents of the film.

While we would like ballot counting to be perfectly accurate or at least have candidates win by a clear margin above the likely error rate, I don’t think that happened in the last Presidential election or in the Bush-Gore election either. That does not surprise me at all as every human process has a finite error rate.

This reflects a situation where neither candidate is viewed by the electorate as a whole as clearly superior. Now that could happen because both candidates are clearly very good, or equally bad.

Or in this case perhaps more likely because the stakes in modern campaigns are very high, given the immense power of an out of control government to interfere in people’s lives, and consequently enormous amounts of money are spent to try and tune both candidates to capture just a bit more of the middle without alienating the more extreme elements.

Does anyone know of an objective written summary of the evidence presented in this film and criticism of it.

Certainly the AP report does not look good in terms of veracity - https://apnews.com/article/e1b49d2311bf900f44fa5c6dac406762