US election 2020: Fact-checking Trump and Biden's final week

After months of bitter campaigning - and plenty of spin and distortion of the facts - the US election is drawing to an end.

We've been fact-checking the candidates throughout, and here is our selection from the final week of the campaign.
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Donald Trump has been far more active on the campaign trail over the past few days, with a punishing schedule of rallies in key states.

There's been no let-up of his repetition of false claims about the pandemic, his record in office and the integrity of postal voting.

Mr Biden has appeared in public far less, but he's also presented fact-checking challenges and often misrepresented the economy under President Trump.
Trump: You can change your vote in "most states"

Verdict: This is not correct. Only in a few states can you change your vote after you've submitted a postal ballot.

There are just a handful of states - including Michigan, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin - where your postal vote can be cancelled after it has been submitted.

In these states, you can then either request a new postal ballot or vote in person.

Most states will allow you to vote in person if you've been sent a postal vote but haven't returned it. Some of these ballots have to be counted last to make sure no-one votes twice.
Biden: "Donald Trump crashed the economy that Barack and I left him. Like everything else he's left and inherited, he squandered it."

Verdict: Only after the onset of the pandemic did economic growth take a nose-dive. It has subsequently experienced a strong recovery.

The latest numbers show economic output surged by an annualised 33% in the third quarter of 2020, following a record fall as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic.

However, the economy has not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Prior to the pandemic, during President Trump's first three years in office, he oversaw an annual average growth of 2.5%.

The last three years of the Obama administration saw a similar level of growth (2.3%).
Mr Trump has said the recent recovery in growth is "the biggest in the history of our country by almost triple... that's bigger than any nation".

This isn't right. Over the third quarter period (July-September) this year, the economy grew by 7.4% in the US (33.1% is the annualised figure). This is less than Germany, Italy and the eurozone as a whole.

If you look at economic growth from the start of the pandemic to the present, the US has done better than Europe but "worse that China and some other Asian economies" such as South Korea, says Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics.