With less than a week left til Election Day, fact-checking the presidential campaigns - Entrepreneur Generations

With less than a week remaining before Election Day, both presidential campaigns are scrambling to win over undecided voters—sometimes with less-than-truthful claims. Here's our weekly fact check round-up:

In the final days of the campaign, President Trump has made repeated false and misleading claims about the coronavirus pandemic. He has also responded with denials and attacks when journalists fact-checked his claims on-camera, and has told crowds at rallies that media coverage of the pandemic is meant to damage him politically and should violate election laws, Salvador Rizzo reports for The Washington Post's Fact Checker. 

Though cases are spiking across the nation (especially in rural areas), Trump insists "we're rounding the corner." He also says U.S. infections are rising because we do more testing than other nations, but health experts say the higher numbers are simply because the U.S. has not controlled the spread of the disease as much as most other countries, Rizzo reports. Trump has claimed that Republican-governed states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas are weathering the virus successfully, while Democrat-governed states are faring worse, partly because of more stringent shut-down orders. Read the article for more details, but that's false.

At an Oct. 27 rally in Omaha, Nebraska, Trump insinuated that the news media began reporting that coronavirus immunity only lasts four months, not for a lifetime, only after he became infected. That's false, Rizzo reports. Public health experts are still learning how long post-infection immunity lasts, and reporting generally reflects the most recent data. 

On Oct. 27 in remarks to reporters, Trump said that counting ballots for weeks after Election Day "is totally inappropriate, and I don't believe that's by our laws." But Trump is wrong. "Time after Election Day to count absentee ballots, overseas military ballots, and provisional ballots is enshrined in both federal and state law,"  Louis Jacobson reports for Politifact. "In fact, federal law allows states until more than a month after the election to finalize their results before the casting of electoral votes." Trump's claim is part of an overall attempt to discredit mail-in voting.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden misspoke twice in the past week about his plan to pay for free community college through the corporate minimum tax. The plan is iffy in the first place: several independent tax groups say the move would raise half of what the Biden campaign estimates, at most. "But on two occasions in the last week, Biden has muddied things even further by flubbing the campaign’s talking point on how much the tax would raise, and how much his higher education proposal would cost," Robert Farley reports for FactCheck.org. In an interview for 60 Minutes aired on Oct. 25, Biden "grossly underestimated" how much it would cost to provide free community college; his campaign later said Biden misspoke. And at an Oct. 24 rally in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Biden muddled the numbers again, this time mistakenly saying that a 15% corporate minimum tax would raise $40 billion. The plan on Biden's website estimates that the move would raise $400 billion.

Also in Pennsylvania, Trump made repeated false and misleading claims at three Oct. 26 rallies about ballots and voting fraud, including a claim that the Democratic governor in Pennsylvania is responsible for counting mail-in ballots. But under state law, county boards of elections are tasked with choosing and equipping polling places, certifying poll watchers, investigating possible fraud, counting ballots, and certifying the results. The governor has no such authority, FactCheck.org reports. 

Politifact also has an excellent round-up of various social media memes and rumors. Click here to read more.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2HO5qgZ With less than a week left til Election Day, fact-checking the presidential campaigns - Entrepreneur Generations

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