FactCheck.org's Weekly Update
November 14, 2020
SciCheck
In a series of tweets, President Donald Trump claimed — without evidence — that the pharma company Pfizer and his own FDA purposely held off on releasing positive interim results about a COVID-19 vaccine candidate until after the election.
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FactCheck Posts
Ballot ‘Curing’ in Pennsylvania Posted on Friday, November 13th, 2020
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Counties in Pennsylvania employed inconsistent policies when it came to “curing” ballots — notifying voters of an error in their mail-in ballot so they could fix it. But contrary to claims by the Trump campaign, that inconsistency didn’t fall strictly along party lines.
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In a tweet, President Donald Trump on Nov. 12 pushed the baseless theory that voting systems deleted millions of votes for him and switched thousands of votes cast for him to his Democratic rival, President-elect Joe Biden.
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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the latest legal challenge to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act today. There are a range of possible outcomes in the case.
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Several of President Donald Trump’s supporters have claimed or suggested — without providing evidence — that a substantial number of votes were fraudulently cast by “dead people” in Pennsylvania.
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Debunking False Stories
A baseless conspiracy theory claims that a secret supercomputer was used to switch millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Experts — and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — have said the theory is a hoax and that safeguards, including paper trails, would deter such an effort.
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Social media posts falsely claim that former Vice President Joe Biden “invented the Office of President-elect.” Donald Trump and Barack Obama also used the term during their transitions to the presidency.
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A postal worker in Erie, Pennsylvania, claimed that his superiors were backdating postmarks on ballots, then told federal investigators that he didn’t actually know that — and then went back to his original position. Despite the flimsiness of the claim, President Donald Trump and his supporters have used it in their effort to blame widespread election fraud for his electoral defeat.
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Campaign officials for President Donald Trump and supporters have promoted the faulty claim that Joe Biden received nearly 100,000 votes in Georgia through ballots that only included selections for president, suggesting it’s “suspicious.” But the claim ignores that some voters do not vote a straight-party ballot.
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A misleading claim that more than 21,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania are dead is circulating online. The figure comes from a conservative group that failed to convince a federal judge in October that its list was accurate.
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Viral social media posts claim that the website RealClearPolitics rescinded a projection that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania. But the website never called the state in the first place; many other media outlets have made that call.
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President Donald Trump’s campaign pushed an altered image of a Washington Times front page to cast doubt on the 2020 election calls made by news outlets. The newspaper never ran the purported front page, declaring Al Gore the winner of the 2000 election.
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