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Tuesday, Jun. 4, 2024

Did Eric Hovde say most senior citizens shouldn’t vote?


no

A TV ad misstated what Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde said about older voters.

Hovde is running in the November 2024 election against U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.

In an April interview, Hovde described what he claimed were voting irregularities involving Wisconsin nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election. A partisan investigation found no evidence of malicious intent behind a few cases of mentally incompetent people voting.

Hovde said: “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months’ life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is in a point to vote.”

In fact, many people in nursing homes can and do vote, oftentimes with assistance.

But in a WinSenate ad posted May 25, the narrator claimed that Hovde said “most seniors shouldn’t vote.” That’s not what he said.

WinSenate, a liberal super PAC, has spent $3.76 million attacking Hovde, according to Open Secrets.

See a full discussion of this at Wisconsin Watch

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

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