Fact-checking the presidential campaigns in the final stretch

With less than a week 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:

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 numbers are rising because we do more testing than other nations, but health experts say it's 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. That's false; read the article for more details.

At an Oct. 27 rally in Omaha, 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. 

In Oct. 27 in remarks to reporters, Trump said counting ballots for weeks after Election Day "is totally inappropriate, and I don't believe that's by our laws." He 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."

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 a "60 Minutes" interview on CBS 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, 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.

Trump made repeated false and misleading claims at three Oct. 26 rallies about ballots and voting fraud, including a claim that the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania is responsible for counting mail-in ballots. Under state law, county election boards investigate possible fraud, count ballots, and certify the results. The governor has no such authority, FactCheck.org reports. 

Politifact also has an excellent roundup of various social media memes and rumors. Click here.