Familiar Claims in a Familiar Presidential Race
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de El Tiempo Latino.
We’ve fact-checked a lot of claims from the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees — after all, they’re the same two men who faced off in 2020. Some of President Joe Biden’s and former President Donald Trump’s assertions are well-worn talking points they will likely continue to trot out on the campaign trail.
As a primer for the 2024 election, here’s our guide to the top 10 falsehoods and distortions — so far — in terms of Trump’s and Biden’s propensity to repeat them.
No ‘Rigged Election’
At just about every opportunity, Trump makes the false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged,” claiming that he and his allies “found tremendous voter fraud” in swing states that he lost, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.
But there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims, and, in fact, there is ample evidence that the 2020 election was — in the words of the Trump administration’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — “the most secure in American history.”
The fact is, Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits challenging the election results. In Georgia, for example, Trump not only lost 11 post-election lawsuits, but a statewide hand audit and a machine recount. “Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said in announcing the results of the audit on Nov. 19, 2020.
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”
