2020 Election Fact Checking

The claim: After Joe Biden tried to 'destroy the life and reputation' of Clarence Thomas, he is 'in control' of SCOTUS, which will 'most likely' decide the election.
Long before Election Day, there was speculation that the result of the contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden would be determined by the U.S. Supreme Court.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s flailing attempt to cling to office after voters decisively chose to oust him has taken the country into a dark and fictional place.

According to falsehoods being told on his behalf and embraced by him, the U.S. election was manipulated by scheming from a dead Venezuelan strongman, by a computer system capable of flipping Trump votes to Joe Biden ones across the country, and by something weird happening in Germany. If that’s not enough, the communists are coming.

None of this happened. None of it is true.

CLAIM: President Donald Trump is “wrong” that Georgia made checking signatures on absentee ballots “impossible.”

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. Georgia’s consent decree made checking signatures so difficult as to be practically impossible.

Georgia is undertaking a hand recount of votes in the recent presidential election, which was narrowly won in the state by former Vice President Joe Biden. But the recount is not checking signatures on absentee ballots, the Trump campaign says.

In a wild, tangent-filled and often contentious press briefing led by President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, the Trump campaign's legal team laid out its case for widespread voter fraud in the election. The roughly 90-minute briefing was overflowing with falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Fact-checking is a form of journalism, and journalism is, at heart, a competitive sport. But when faced with this year’s dual fire hoses of political and COVID-19 misinformation, fact-checkers have had little choice but to work together.

The Paris Peace Forum, a yearly gathering of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations working to solve global problems, highlighted this fact when recognizing the work of the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance in the fight against COVID-19 misinformation.

This is a false claim and comes at a moment when President Trump’s campaign has filed lawsuits, alleging voter fraud in certain states.

The man in the picture in this widely shared post, however, is not Dallas Jones, Biden’s Texas political director. It’s a photo of Cuba Gooding Jr., who, as the Associated Press reported, was arrested in June 2019 after a woman accused him of groping her at a bar.

In November 2020, a raft of Republican lawmakers and right-leaning commentators condemned Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for, according to them, politicizing Pfizer’s announcement that the COVID-19 vaccine it had been developing appeared to be 90% effective.

On Nov. 9, Tom Elliott, the right-leaning founder of the media company Grabien, tweeted out a short clip of Cuomo’s appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” earlier that day. In the clip, Cuomo says:

Two days after the election, a postal worker from Erie, Pennsylvania, claimed in a video published by Project Veritas that his superiors instructed postal workers to backdate ballots that were sent after Election Day. The alleged goal: Make late ballots eligible to be counted in the official Pennsylvania tally. The Trump campaign raised the issue with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who passed it along to the Justice Department as evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election.

Four congressional Democrats sent a letter to the owners of Dominion Voting Systems and cited several problems that “threaten the integrity of our elections,” including “vote switching.”

Dominion Voting Systems said in a statement on Friday that it "categorically denies" claims that its election software encountered glitches that impacted the results of the presidential election last week.

The company's software is used in 28 U.S. states, including in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. After official sources called the national race for Joe Biden on November 7, President Donald Trump accused the company of deleting millions of votes cast for him across the country.