Up to old elex tricks?

OVER the last 16 tortuous months of the Biden presidency, it’s become clear that the Democrats are running on empty. They are not even trying to reset their electorally poisonous policies.

Politically, this means they are heading for annihilation at the midterms. Yet they appear curiously relaxed, as if winning elections is no longer a priority.

One thing you know is that the Dems are not hiding under the duvet sucking their thumbs. Like the Fantastic Mr. Fox, they have a cunning plan.

They might not be any good at governing, but when it comes to seizing power by foul means or fair, they are world class.

Which brings us to the thorny question of the 2020 election. Most Americans agree something wasn’t quite right about the new rules imposed under cover of COVID.

Forget Sidney Powell’s harebrained Kraken that never materialized.

There were lots of ways Democrats tried to tilt the playing field in their favor, some more successfully than others. Their pals in Big Tech censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop coverage before the election was one triumph.

Now pesky evidence is starting to emerge of systematic schemes to subvert the electoral process — which must not be allowed to happen again if we are to restore faith in elections.

Following ‘mules’

The most compelling evidence to date has emerged in “2000 Mules,” the upcoming documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who draws on research by election-integrity group True the Vote to expose suspicious ballot harvesting.

Using cellphone geotracking and surveillance video, it shows a network of “mules” in battleground states busily collecting ballots from get-out-the-vote NGOs and stuffing them, a few at a time, into multiple drop boxes in the dead of night.

The extent of the operation is jaw-dropping.

True the Vote bought 3 trillion geolocation signals from cellphones that were near drop boxes and also near election nonprofits, from Oct. 1, 2020, through to the election on Nov. 3. In Georgia, the end date covered the Jan. 6, 2021, runoff.

Then they went searching for “mules,” operatives who picked up ballots from election NGOs — such as Stacey Abrams’ outfit, Fair Fight Action — and then carried them to different drop boxes, depositing between three to 10 ballots in each box before moving to the next.

Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, chose the term “mule” because “it felt a lot like a cartel, it felt like trafficking . . . This is, in its essence, ballot trafficking . . . You have the collectors. You have the stash houses, which are the nonprofits. And then you have the mules that are doing the drops.”

Data analyst Gregg Phillips set a threshold for each mule to visit at least 10 drop boxes within a defined area and at least five visits to one or more NGOs.

For example, in the Atlanta metro area, they drew a line around 309 drop boxes and bought all the cellphone data of people that had been near those drop boxes and NGOs.

That narrowed the search to 2000 mules.

Then they went looking for public surveillance-camera footage of those drop boxes. In all, they found 4 million minutes across the country.

The results are stunning. When a mule is matched with video, you can see the scheme come to life.

A car pulls up at a drop box after midnight. A man gets out, looks around surreptitiously, approaches the box, stuffs in a handful of ballots and high-tails it out of there. Then he goes to the next box, again and again.

After Dec. 23, 2020, Phillips noticed mules in Georgia started wearing gloves. He pinpoints the change to an indictment for ballot stuffing handed up in Arizona on Dec. 22. “The way the FBI nailed them was fingerprints.” After that, mules started wearing gloves.

The data pattern is unmistakable, as D’Souza shows a spiderweb of routes taken by various mules between NGOs and drop boxes.

For each of the 2,000 mules, the average number of drop-box visits was 38, with an average five ballots deposited per visit. That’s 380,000 suspect votes.

D’Souza breaks down the numbers to see if they would have changed the outcome of the election.

In Michigan, 500 mules averaged 50 drop-box visits, at five ballots per drop, giving you 125,000 suspect votes, not enough to overwhelm Biden’s 154,000vote advantage over Trump.

In Wisconsin, 100 mules averaged 28 drop-box visits each, which gives us 14,000 suspect votes, 6,000 votes short of giving Trump the win.

But in Georgia, where 250 mules averaged 24 drop-box visits each, we get 30,000 suspect votes, more than enough to overcome Biden’s 12,000-vote advantage. D’Souza moves Georgia’s 16 electoral votes into the Trump column.

In Arizona, 200 mules averaging 20 drop-box visits makes 20,000 suspect votes, giving another 11 hypothetical electoral votes to Trump.

In Philadelphia alone, 1,100 mules averaged 50 drop-box visits, giving us 275,000 suspect votes, which would flip the Pennsylvania result to Trump, giving him another 20 electoral votes.

“Shockingly, even this narrow way of looking at just our 2,000 mules in these swing states gives Trump the win with 279 electoral votes to Biden’s 259,” says D’Souza.

Focus on the future

There is no way to scrutinize those ballots now and see if they are fraudulent, but if we must have drop boxes at election time, they need to be secure and under 24/7 surveillance.

Obviously, something stinks. But the last thing Republican candidates — even the undeclared Donald Trump — should be doing on the campaign trail is focusing backward on their 2020 election loss. It makes them look like sore losers.

When I interviewed President Trump last year for my book “Laptop From Hell,” he kept bringing up the stolen election.

I told him I looked at it like a football game. Even if the umpire was biased and the game was rigged, it’s over. Best to put your efforts into winning the next game.

Trump didn’t like my analogy. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s like Tiffany’s. They stole the diamonds, and we have to get them back.”

There’s no getting the diamonds back now. But we can stop the store being robbed again.