LAKELAND, Fla. — The mid-morning wave of farmer’s market shoppers picked through amateur art and leafy greens until their gaze caught a group forming around the downtown park. The swelling crowd — a train of strollers, flip flops and jean shorts, packs of 20-something-year-olds and kids with weekend energy — would have blended with everyone […]
The headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution summed up Georgia’s June 9 primary in two words: “Complete meltdown.” Some waited in line for hours to vote. County officials were swamped with mail-in ballots. Poll workers struggled to use new equipment. Some counties had fewer polling locations than originally planned or had to relocate polling locations. When […]
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to alleviate fears of flying during the pandemic at an event with airline and rental car executives. “The airplanes have just not been vectors when you see spread of the coronavirus,” DeSantis said during a discussion at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Aug. 28. “The evidence is the evidence. And […]
President Donald Trump is maintaining his money lead against Democratic nominee Joe Biden, although Biden made up ground on his way to becoming the official nominee. For this, our first update on the presidential money race since July 9, we looked at three sources of funds: dollars raised directly by the campaign; dollars raised by […]
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correctly quote what Biden said about taxes for the top 0.1% of income earners. Biden claimed that group got a tax cut of $1.35 trillion, which the story accurately noted is wrong. But the figure was incorrectly transcribed in the quote. In his first in-person appearance in […]
President Donald Trump, the country’s most prominent critic of mail-in voting, suggested North Carolina voters ought to test out whether the election system would prevent them from voting twice. A reporter for WECT TV in Wilmington told Trump that 600,000 North Carolina voters could cast ballots by mail for the Nov. 3 election. “Yeah, I […]
President Donald Trump during a campaign stop in North Carolina on Wednesday encouraged people to vote both by mail and in person this fall, before walking back some of his comments a day later. Voting twice in the same election is illegal under California and federal law. “Let them send it in and let them […]
In the days leading up to Kentucky’s June 23 primary, national figures raised alarms about the state’s Election Day voting infrastructure. Celebrities from film director Ava Duvernay to former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to NBA superstar LeBron James decried the closing of all but one in-person Election Day polling place in each Kentucky county. […]
Mysterious black-clad thugs on flights to Washington to disrupt the president’s political convention — shh, say no more! That was the message President Donald Trump delivered when he offered an anecdote during an Aug. 31 interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingaham. Trump: “We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, […]
PolitiFact is adding fact-checking coverage of 18 pivotal U.S. House and Senate races for the final weeks before the Nov. 3 elections. As part of its 2020 coverage, PolitiFact is working with campaign monitors in 12 key House districts and six Senate races to search the elections for potential misinformation. PolitiFact reporters will then fact-check […]
Remember Florida’s presidential election recount in 2000, with the hanging chads, the magnifying glasses, and the weeks of courtroom battles about how to count the votes? There could be post-election vote-counting chaos again in the 2020 election — maybe in Florida, maybe some other state, or even in several states at the same time. The […]
Updated as of Sept. 4, 2020 A pair of controversial shootings in Kenosha unleashed an avalanche of reaction. From news conferences to social media, opinions and factual claims were plentiful. It began Aug. 23, 2020, when a Kenosha police officer shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake seven times in the back. Blake survived but is paralyzed from […]