Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022
Did U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters of Arizona flip-flop on the legitimacy of 2020 presidential election results?
Blake Masters, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, has put forward conflicting positions regarding the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 2020 win.
His campaign website, for instance, initially called the election “a rotten mess,” claiming, “If we had had a free and fair election, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today and America would be so much better off.” He repeated that claim During a Sept. 8 interview on KTAR, again saying that if “everybody followed the rules and the law as written, President Trump would be in the Oval Office.”Less than a month later, however, during an Oct. 6 debate on Arizona PBS, Masters said Biden was “the legitimate president” and had been “duly sworn and certified.” He has also removed the language about a Trump win from his website.
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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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The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is the state’s only independent, nonpartisan and collaborative nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. AZCIR's mission is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable by exposing injustice and systemic inequities through investigative journalism.
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