Fiorina, Georgia’s electric cars take a ride on the AJC Truth-O-Meter

The fact check then moves on to a panel of veteran editors who debate the statement and the reporter’s recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling. The panel votes on a final ruling; majority prevails.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina took a ride on the Truth-O-Meter twice last week.

We also looked at a claim that sales of electric cars in Georgia have plunged since state lawmakers pulled the plug on a $5,000 tax credit for purchase and leases of these cars and added an annual registration fee.

And we checked out a claim by California Gov. Jerry Brown that the term “smog” — no stranger to metro Atlanta — was invented in his state.

Abbreviated versions of those fact-checks are below. Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com/georgia/.

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Don Francis on Wednesday, October 28th, 2015 in an interview with Watchdog.org:

Electric car sales in Georgia have dropped dramatically since a $5,000 tax credit was eliminated and a $200 annual registration fee was imposed July 1.

The Georgia General Assembly earlier this year pulled the plug on one of the nation’s most generous state tax credits for electric cars.

At the same time, state lawmakers voted to impose a $200 annual registration

fee on owners of some plug-in hybrids and all zero-emissions vehicles to make up

for the gas taxes those motorists don’t pay and to help fund a backlog of road

projects.

Both changes took effect July 1, and already, preliminary numbers show sales

of the Nissan Leaf and other electric cars are plummeting, Don Francis,

coordinator of the Clean Cities-Georgia Coalition, said in an interview

published Oct. 28 at Watchdog.org.

Is Francis right? We decided to check.

Francis obtained data showing that new electric car registrations in Georgia fell 89 percent from 1,338 in June, the last month that the tax credit was available, to 148 in August. Sales data from the Georgia Department of Revenue backed up Francis’ claim.

Keep in mind that car sales spiked as people rushed to buy electric cars before the tax credit expired in July, and that makes the post-July 1 drop in sales look much more shocking. Nonetheless, the figures show Francis was on the money.

We therefore rated his statement as True.

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Carly Fiorina on Wednesday, October 28th, 2015 in the third Republican presidential debate:

92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.”

As the only female candidate on the debate stage, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said women voters shouldn’t assume that just because Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is a woman that she has their interests at heart.

“It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first

woman president, when every single policy she espouses and every single policy

of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women, ” Fiorina said.

“Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged

to women.”

Her claim dates back to the 2012 presidential race when it was used by the Republican National Committee and GOP nominee Mitt Romney. At the time, March 2012, the claim had some numerical validity but was also cherry-picked and flawed. We rated it Mostly False.

By January 2013, the jobs numbers don’t back it up at all. The number of women with jobs increased by 416,000 during Obama’s first term.

We rated this claim False.

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Carly Fiorina on Sunday, November 1st, 2015 in comments on “Fox News Sunday”:

“We have record numbers of people living in poverty.”

Carly Fiorina said on “Fox News Sunday” accused the “liberal media” of quibbling with details to bury the larger truths about the economy.

She went on to say: “We have record numbers of people living in poverty. Those are the facts. That is the truth.”

We wanted to check out her claim that there are more people living in poverty now than ever before.

We found Fiorina’s right that the number of people living in poverty (46.7 million in 2014) is the highest since the census began keeping track in 1959. However, the poverty rate —- the measure typically used —- is nowhere near historical highs.

We therefore rated Fiorina’s claim Half True.

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Jerry Brown on Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 in a speech

“Smog was invented in Los Angeles. It was. The name was invented. There was a fellow at Caltech and he came up with the idea and they called it smog.”

As it turns out, it depends on what you consider ‘smog.’

Gov. Jerry Brown, a warrior in the state’s air pollution battles, offered his California-centric version of smog’s history during a speech in Los Angeles in October.

“Smog was invented in Los Angeles. It was, ” the governor told an audience at Griffith We decided to fact-check Brown’s “smog was invented in Los Angeles” statement, to cut through what seemed like a dubious claim.

A look at historical sources shows the term smog dates back more than a century.

But looking deeper, a gradual shift in the term’s meaning took place in the 1940s and 1950s as scientists, including Caltech professor Arie Haagen-Smit, studied the cause of Los Angeles’ persistent and foul brown haze. In his statement, the governor references Haagen-Smit, who is credited as the first to prove L.A.’s smog was caused by automobile exhaust, and who at least one current Caltech professor says is “often described as inventing smog.”

The governor’s statement, while fuzzy at first glance, is partially accurate.