Philip Bump for WaPo:

Before we explore the ascent of this phrase, we should dispatch with its implications, as I dispatched with your assumptions that my father was some sort of hardened criminal. Even if True the Vote’s allegations about what occurred are accurate, having third parties submit ballots on behalf of other people was not uniformly illegal in the states included in D’Souza’s documentary during the 2020 election. In Wisconsin, there was no law against collecting ballots from voters and submitting them. In Pennsylvania, collecting ballots was legal. In other states, one could authorize a family member or other person to return a completed ballot on one’s behalf.

This is important because the word “traffic” depends on illegality. When I used it to describe our road trip, I used it inappropriately. When True the Vote’s team used it at a legislative hearing in Wisconsin earlier this year, they were using it inappropriately, too.

And that’s assuming that the allegations about what occurred are even accurate. The Associated Press has a lengthy fact check of D’Souza’s film that makes obvious how much the allegations depend on leaps of logic and insinuations — which is exactly what the phrase “ballot trafficking” is meant to do.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public explored this rhetorical gambit in an analysis published last weekend.

“The term trafficking is usually defined as the dealing or trading of something illegal. The long-standing term ‘vote trafficking,’ for example, has been used in the past to describe systems of buying votes from voters,” the researchers write. “In these cases, the voter’s involvement in fraud renders the vote invalid. This parallels other uses of the term, where traffickers buy and sell illegal items or engage in illegal trade.”

“Illegal ballot collection, on the other hand, does not usually involve illegal votes,” they then point out, adding that “unless it can be shown that the third-party collector modified the ballots, findings are unlikely to cast doubt on previous voting tallies.”

The researchers note that the title of D’Souza’s film, “2000 Mules,” itself adopts the vocabulary of illegal narcotics distribution to cast the process as suspect and illegal.

“The parallel is erroneous,” they write. “If a person takes a ride with a cab that turns out not to be properly licensed by the city, the cabbie is not now a ‘passenger mule’ and the passenger is not being ‘trafficked’ — the passenger is simply a passenger in an illegal cab.”