2020 U.S. election: Trump and Biden’s last week fact check

After months of bitter campaigning, and many twists and turns, the US elections are drawing to a close.

We’ve been checking the candidate data throughout the process and here is our pick from the last week of the campaign.

Donald Trump has been much more active in the election campaign in recent days, with a schedule of rallies in key states.

He has not stopped repeating false claims about the pandemic, his record in office and the integrity of the vote-by-mail.

Biden has appeared in public far less, but he has also presented fact-checking challenges and often misrepresented the economy under President Trump.

Verdict: this is not correct. Only in some states can you change your vote after you have mailed a ballot.

There are only a handful of states, including Michigan, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin, where your vote-by-mail can be canceled after it has been sent.

In these states, you can request a new postal ballot or vote in person.

Most states will allow you to vote in person if they have mailed you a ballot but have not returned it. Some of these ballots need to be counted last to make sure no one votes twice.

Verdict: Only after the start of the pandemic did economic growth plummet. It has subsequently experienced a strong recovery.

The latest figures show that economic output increased by 33% annualized in the third quarter of 2020, following a record drop as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the economy has not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Before the pandemic, during President Trump’s first three years in office,

it monitored an average annual growth of 2.5%.

The last three years of the Obama administration saw a similar level of growth (2.3%).

Trump has said that the recent recovery in growth is “the largest in our country’s history at almost triple … that’s bigger than any other nation.”

This is not correct. During the third quarter (July-September) of this year, the economy grew 7.4% in the US (33.1% is the annualized figure). This is less than Germany, Italy and the eurozone as a whole.

If you look at economic growth from the onset of the pandemic to the present, the United States has done better than Europe but “worse than China and some other Asian economies” like South Korea, says Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics.

Verdict: The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does not make this projection, nor others.

Biden may have been referring to a projection, not from the CDC, but from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

However, the 100,000 figure Biden cites is significantly above the IHME’s latest estimate that 62,000 lives would be saved by the end of January 2021, if mask use were nearly universal.

The CDC recommends that people wear masks in public places, events, and gatherings, to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Verdict: This needs context. Joe Biden wants to end the cash bail system, but Trump is wrong about its impact.

Joe Biden has pledged to end cash bail, the deposit a defendant pays to avoid arrest while awaiting trial.

Their website says: “The cash bail system incarcerates people who are presumed innocent.”

There are currently some 450,000 people detained before the trial. However, a significant proportion of them do not have the option of bail, particularly those accused of serious crimes.

So Trump’s 400,000 figure is too high, experts say. And it is also not correct to call all people who cannot bail “dangerous criminals.”

“Cash bail results in detention based on inability to pay. As a result, a low-risk homeless person can be detained and a high-risk wealthy person can be released,” says Harvard University Professor Crystal Yang .

Verdict: This is true, according to a study.

The context for this claim is that Biden has criticized the big tax cuts under the Trump administration that have led wealthy businesses and individuals to pay substantially less.

In 2018, 91 of the top 500 U.S. companies did not actually pay taxes, according to a report from the Institute for Fiscal and Economic Policy.

Despite generating nearly $ 80 billion in pre-tax income, some businesses did not pay taxes, as the United States corporate tax code “lowers the bar on the amount of tax evasion needed to bring it down to zero,” according to the Institute.

Companies that paid zero taxes included Amazon and Starbucks.