Night two of the Republican National Convention has kicked off in Milwaukee.
CNN’s Facts First team is fact checking the convention and will update this page throughout the night.
Kari Lake said Tuesday that Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, her likely opponent in the state’s US Senate race this fall, voted last week to let undocumented immigrants “illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”
“These guys are full, they’re full of bad ideas,” Lake said in her speech. “Just last week Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”
Fact First: This claim is false.
The House did not vote on whether to allow noncitizens to vote. The chamber passed a bill on July 10 that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the legislation, which is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely occurs. When people register to vote, they must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number, and their identity is checked against existing databases. Voters are required to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a US citizen. Noncitizens who vote illegally can face imprisonment or deportation.
Gallego said in a statement that he opposed the bill because its “only purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to take away the rights of Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”
“Of course, only U.S. citizens should vote,” said Gallego. “But this bill isn’t about that, it’s about making it harder for Arizonans to vote, including married women, servicemembers, Native Arizonans, seniors, and people with disabilities.”
From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn
Perry Johnson, a Michigan business owner who previously ran for governor and president, said Tuesday that income rose consistently under former President Donald Trump.
“Under Trump, family income went up every year. That is a fact,” Johnson told the crowd.
Facts first: Johnson is incorrect. Median family income fell in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic in both inflation-adjusted and non-adjusted terms.
Typical family income grew by several thousand dollars during each of Trump’s first three years in office, before adjusting for inflation. But it fell by $1,660 in 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy.
After factoring in inflation, typical family income fell by nearly $2,900 in 2020, after rising in each of the first three years of Trump’s administration.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
A video played near the beginning of Republican National Committee proceedings on Tuesday evening featured a narrator saying, “It’s not just big cities. Rising crime is a problem everywhere.”
Facts First: The claim that there is a problem “everywhere” with “rising crime” is false. Both violent crime and property crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities.
Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020, Trump’s last calendar year in office. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.
There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.
Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
