FACT CHECKERS AWARD MORE PINOCCHIO’S FOR TRUMP’S & RNC’S CLAIMS

…Here is the giant factory in Haiti that Trump falsely called a “sweatshop”.

 

The percentage of Trump’s voter fraud in US elections turns out to be .00000031%. 

 

Trump has claimed repeatedly in recent days that the US election system is “rigged.” The Fact Checkers at the Washington Post have looked at Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud and that undocumented immigrants are voting and swaying elections.  After a detailed investigation into these claims, they have come back and said it’s all basically a bunch of B.S.

 

Trump had referenced a 2012 study that found inaccuracies in the election system. For example, that 24 million voter registrations were significantly inaccurate or no longer valid. There were more than 1.8 million records for people who died, but whose registrations were still on voter rolls.

 

But these problems do not indicate isolated or widespread voter fraud. Trump even said the 1.8 million dead people are “voting for somebody else,” that is not true and as usual, it’s all talk and no proof.   Yes, a handful of people have tried to vote on behalf of dead people, but there is no evidence such voter rolls are being manipulated on anything like a large scale.  Even if these deceased people are still on the rolls, it is very difficult for people to have wide spread voting impersonations across a large area of multiple precincts.  Just because a name is on the rolls doesn’t mean that someone is going to have the fake ID to vote in that person’s place.

 

In the 2000 to 2014 elections, only 31 incidents or credible allegations of voter fraud or voter impersonations at the polls were found, and that was out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.  To put this in perspective that is .00000031%  of voter fraud.  There have been a number of comprehensive studies on voter fraud in US elections and all of the studies came to the same basically conclusion.  It’s not only not a big problem, it’s a non-problem.

 

In addition, counter to Trump’s claims, illegal immigrants are not voting and swaying elections. The Trump campaign is using research that was published two years ago in the Monkey Cage, a blog hosted by the same Washington Post.  But Trump is incorrectly using the data, and does not note that there have been some major critiques of this research. Some critiques are now being incorporated into a revision of the original study. The researchers have totally debunked Trumps’ current use of the data.

 

As is usual for the Fact Checkers, they have awarded these claims by Donald Trump with their highest level of false statements, Four Pinocchio’s.

 

By the way, it’s nearly impossible to rig any election. And we’re talking about a nationwide effort of local, county, state and federal election officials colluding to commit a federal felony. Remember, every prescient has workers from both major parties and every poll watcher would have to be in on the rigging, including the lawyers for both parties that are also poll watchers.

 

Where I am going with this is not just against these basic lies from the Trump campaign, but when he totally lies about some of the very good things that were done by not just the Clintons, but also by a joint effort of both former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  This was about their efforts in helping those unfortunates in Haiti after the massive earthquake in 2010.

 

Here is a quote from Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Panama City, Florida, this October 11^th, 2016: “In their biggest project, the Clintons used $400 million in aid and US taxpayer funds to build what amounted to a massive sweatshop. And guess who set it up? Cheryl Mills.” (Cheryl Mills was a top aide of Hillary Clinton)

Trump’s attack against the Clintons’ involvement with a factory in Haiti has emerged as a new talking point in recent weeks. The Post had previously awarded Four Pinocchio’s to a claim from Trump’s supporters and a surrogate about the Clintons’ role in Haiti, so here are the facts.

 

Trump is referring to a garment factory that was built in a town called Caracol, located north of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.  The factory was built after the devastating 2010 earthquake in 2010.

 

The Clintons played a major role in Haiti earthquake recovery efforts, and Bill Clinton was the public face of US efforts in Haiti. He was the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, and the co-leader of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund with former president George W. Bush.   He was also the co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC).  This was a quasi-government planning body that approved hundreds of millions of dollars in US government-funded recovery projects.

 

“This team — Cheryl Mills, who is absolutely formidable, and both Clintons, who were so deeply committed — managed to coordinate the zoo of donors to provide the infrastructure, and they managed to convince this firm [Sae-A] that it should come to Haiti and create jobs,” said Paul Collier, the Oxford University development specialist who helped create the plan for Caracol Industrial Park.

 

Did the factory “amount to a sweatshop”? As our friends at PolitiFact found, Sae-A does not have a perfect record with workers. But the latest inspection by Better Work Haiti, a project of the International Labor Organization, raised no issues that would amount calling it a sweatshop environment. Sae-A adequately handled health and safety responsibilities. It has an anti-harassment policy and does training to reinforce the policy for supervisors and workers.

 

Full-time workers are paid at least the minimum wage. The factory provides paid vacation, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave and free transportation to and from the park and surrounding communities for all employees. Sae-A opened a school that provides free education to workers’ children, and it organizes soccer tournaments for the workers and supervisors. The inside of the factory, based on a promotional video and a Haitian news report, doesn’t resemble anything close to a sweatshop.

 

“More broadly, there seems to be an erroneous implication that any factory amounts to a sweatshop. That is simply false and especially ironic since the very person who made these misstatements has spoken about bringing manufacturing back to the United States,” Sae-A spokesman Lon Garwood said.

 

Under legislation governing US-Haiti trade relations, the government of Haiti and individual apparel producers must comply with International Labor Organization standards and related Haitian labor law, the State Department said. The US Labor Department has not identified any apparel producers operating in the park as noncompliant with required labor standards, according to the State Department.

 

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Trump campaign have disputed the “non-sweatshop” rating of the Fact Checkers.  They pointed to problems over working conditions found at a Sae-A’s factory, but that was a factory in Guatemala, not in Haiti.  They talked of complaints of low pay and allegations of sexual harassment raised prior to the July 2016 inspection of the factory at Caracol, but they offered nothing as evidence of those complaints.

 

Why do they in the GOP always have to lie?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016