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Fact-checking Trump's dishonest weekend: The President made at least 66 false or misleading claims in three days

By Daniel Dale
Updated 5:40 PM ET, Mon October 19, 2020

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's dishonesty is getting worse.
Trump has been reliably deceptive for his entire presidency, filling his speeches and tweets with lies and other false statements.

The frequency and magnitude of his deception tends to accelerate, however, during campaign season -- when he complements his usual ad-libbed inaccuracy with a barrage of inaccurate statements that are written into his speech scripts.

For fact checkers, the period from Friday through Sunday was one of the most challenging of Trump's entire presidency: he made at least 66 separate false or misleading claims over that three-day span. In other words, it was 66 false or misleading claims without even counting all the times he repeated some of those same 66 claims over the course of the three days.

Trump did have a packed schedule. On Friday, he made a speech to Florida seniors and held rallies in Florida and Georgia; on Saturday, he held rallies in Wisconsin and Michigan; on Sunday, he held a rally in Nevada.
Still, though, this was an egregious stretch for the President, no matter how much he was talking.
Here is a list of the false and misleading claims we counted:

Voting and the election

Mail-in ballots

In Georgia, Trump continued to suggest that mail-in voting was rife with fraud, saying that "unsolicited" ballots -- where states send a ballot to every eligible registered voter -- are a "big con job."

Facts First: "Unsolicited" ballots are not a "con job." Fraud is exceedingly rare in US elections -- whether with in-person voting, mail voting in states where voters have to request ballots or mail voting in states where all eligible registered voters are sent ballots without having to make requests.

Voters in nine states and the District of Columbia are being sent mail ballots this year without needing to request them. However, five of those states -- Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii and Washington -- have held their elections primarily by mail since before the pandemic, and there has not been any significant incidence of fraud.

Ballots and a river

As supposed proof of his allegations about mail-in voting, Trump said in Michigan, "Did you see they found 50,000 ballots in like a river?"

Facts First: This is totally baseless. We could not find any examples of 2020 general election ballots being found in a river, let alone "50,000" of them. (Trump has previously claimed that ballots were found in rivers without saying it was "50,000.")

Ballots and Virginia
After he baselessly alleged in Georgia that ballots were found in a river, Trump said, "They find 'em -- I think 500,000 ballots in Virginia."

Facts First: Trump was wrongly describing what happened in Virginia. About 500,000 voters were sent inaccurate absentee ballot applications -- not ballots themselves -- by a non-profit group that aimed to promote voting. One of the main errors was that many of the return envelopes the group included in the mailing had incorrect addresses; for example, voters in Fairfax County were sent return envelopes with the address of the election office in the city of Fairfax.

This was a significant error, but it was not fraud, and it did not affect ballots themselves. Virginia authorities said they would make sure that the correct office received any applications sent to an incorrect office.

MUCH MORE...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/19/politics/fact-check-trump-dishonest-weekend-florida-michigan-georgia-wisconsin/index.html