More trumped-up charges of election fraud in Georgia Seven months after the 2020 presidential election, new conspiracy theories and baseless claims of voter fraud continue to emerge. And former president Donald Trump keeps amplifying them. We have a high bar for fact-checking the former president these days. But this latest claim has legs and spurred a state investigation, despite a dearth of evidence of fraud. Trump in recent days has been issuing statements about a drop-box "scam" unraveling in Fulton County, the most populous in Georgia and a big portion of metro Atlanta. "Thank you and congratulations to Laura Baigert of the Georgia Star News on the incredible reporting you have done. Keep going! The scam is all unraveling fast," he said. The Georgia Star News, a pro-Trump publication, filed public-records requests across the state, seeking the chain-of-custody forms that track the movements of all ballots deposited in drop boxes for the November election. When Fulton County responded months later, the documents were incomplete. After several follow-up requests, Fulton County officials supplied 1,180 of 1,565 ballot transfer forms. The missing forms accounted for 18,901 ballots, the Georgia Star News said. (President Biden won the state by less than 12,000 votes.) Fulton County officials acknowledged they had not provided all the records and said some forms appeared to be missing. Days later, the news organization Georgia Public Broadcasting said it obtained almost all the ballot transfer forms from the county. But by the time that fact check was published, Georgia's secretary of state had announced an investigation into Fulton County's missing ballot forms. For spinning another claim about election fraud without evidence, Trump earned Four Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Klain flubs tweet on child tax credit Do you have kids? Need a break? Then you'll love this fact check. White House chief of staff Ron Klain was slightly off the mark when he tweeted this week that "every family with kids gets a tax cut next month." In fact, as the Biden administration has been careful to note in its online materials, a one-year expansion of the child tax credit will cover "nearly all working families." The cutoff is based on income, so that high-earning households would receive a small benefit or none at all. The difference was not worth many Pinocchios, but we figured it was a good opportunity to explain the workings of this beefed-up tax credit, which many families are about to start receiving in monthly payments. For this tax year, the age limit for eligible children was raised from 16 to 17, and the value of the credit increased from $2,000 per child to $3,600 for children 5 and younger, and $3,000 for those ages 6 to 17. Under the terms of Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus plan, half of the total tax credit will be sent to eligible households in monthly payments starting in July, and the other half can be claimed when filing a tax return for 2021. The payments will be up to $300 a month for each qualifying child 5 and younger, and up to $250 a month for each child from ages 6 to 17. "Roughly 39 million households — covering 88% of children in the United States — are slated to begin receiving monthly payments without any further action required," the IRS and Treasury Department said last month. After we reached out to the White House, Klain posted a corrected tweet noting the 88 percent figure. He avoided Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
Email 
No comments:
Post a Comment