I do urge that everyone who should be eligible to vote makes sure they are registered and then follow through and participate by actually casting a vote.
This election season I've paid close attention to multiple independent fact-checking sites via news feeds. The links for such sites can be found in my sidebar as "some informational blogs." I'm sure there are those who would question how "indpendent" they may be, but from what I could tell they do indeed seem to be reasonably non-partisan and do a good job of digging for facts, including providing links to sources. There's no way I could ever do even a tiny fraction of the digging they do, so I'm content to rely on their efforts as a starting base for considering candidates and issues as I view them through my own life experiences. There may be times you could maybe quibble with an interpretation or two, but at least the factual basis seems to be in place and you can always draw your own conclusions.
With that as introduction I now want to point out a TIME.com article from back on September 23 which points out some things I always suspected, but didn't honestly know for a fact...
Truth in Advertising? Not for Political Ads
By Amy Sullivan
Click the link for the full article, but here are some possibly eye-opening passages (I'll highlight some key bits in bold)...
...in the world of political advertising, truth is irrelevant. The growing number of whoppers piling up in the 2008 campaign are reminders of an oft-forgotten, unfortunate political fact: it's perfectly legal for candidates to lie to voters in commercials or other advertising.
This may surprise those who were under the impression that the "truth in advertising" standard applied to all advertising. Commercial companies are bound by restrictions that prevent them from making false claims about their products or those of their competitors. Certainly, corporations test those laws all the time, but they do so at a significant risk....
Candidates are not held to the same commercial standard, and the reason is simple: their statements and advertisements are considered "political speech," which falls under the protection of the First Amendment. The noble idea undergirding what otherwise seems like a political loophole is the belief that voters have a right to uncensored information on which to base their decisions. Too often, however, the result is a system in which the most distorted information comes from the campaigns themselves. And as this year's presidential race is showing, that presents an opportunity for a candidate willing to go beyond simple distortions and exaggerations by making repeated and unapologetic use of objectively false statements.
But it's not just that candidates are allowed to launch unfounded attacks against their opponents or make false claims about their own records. Broadcasters are actually obligated to run their ads, even those known to be false. Under the Federal Communications Act, a station can have a blanket policy of refusing all ads from all candidates. But they cannot single out and decline to air a particular commercial whose content they know to be a lie.
. . . .
Some states have tried to establish their own standards for truth in political advertising, but with little success. Washington State passed a law in 1984 that made it illegal to sponsor campaign commercials that knowingly "make a false statement of material fact." Violations could incur fines of up to $10,000 for each instance, and could also result in election outcomes being voided. After 14 years, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, prompting one of the dissenting justices to complain that it was "the first court in the history of the Republic to declare First Amendment protection for calculated lies."
Such bitter language can seem a bit high-minded for the scrappy political arena. In a country with a free press, after all, journalists are able to fact-check campaign advertisements and let voters know when claims are exaggerated or misleading. What does it matter if McCain says Obama would impose a new tax burden on middle-class families or if Obama claims that McCain proposed abolishing the Department of Education? Candidates lie, fact-checkers out them, and voters have all the information they need to make their choices.
But the free market of ideas doesn't always work so well. As candidates know, a far greater percentage of voters hear the original lie in a campaign ad than ever read about the fact-checked version in a local paper or website like Factcheck.org or Politifact.com. And even if voters do hear the refutation of an ad's claims, studies show that may not alter their perceptions created by the original ad. It may well be that the standards for commercial advertising have worked too well, instilling in many viewers the belief that what they hear on television is mostly true. "You hear people say, 'The ads must have some truth to them, or they wouldn't let them on television,' " says Brooks Jackson of Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "Truth in advertising lulls us into a false sense of security."
I always wondered about those political ads that all too often are about denigrating the opponent with seemingly outrageous claims (rather than presenting any semblance of solid reasons to vote for a candidate they're supposed to be promoting). I guess I too sort of assumed there was just a really relaxed standard for defining "the truth," but that those truth in advertising laws still held at some level. Turns out they don't. It explains a lot.
It's of particular concern to me because those ads are thought out and planned down to the last detail. And future campaign rally speeches and debate talking points spring from them. So if those ads can be downright false, a whole campaign can literally be based on lies and distortions.
I can't help thinking there's got to be a better way, but it's certainly not emails that get passed along person to person. This item at Politifact.com recaps some of their "Pants on Fire" rulings from this election season and it mentions that...
Chain e-mails have received the most Pants on Fires — 13. (Indeed, the chain e-mails have the worst record for accuracy of any source we've checked. Nearly half of their claims are False or Pants on Fire.)
So... All that being said, I sincerely wish that whoever wins tomorrow (my candidate or not) turns out to be a basically good person with the determination and courage to lead our nation in a positive direction for the good, not only of our country, but of the planet in general.
Oh, I'd also like to add... I occasionally see comments here and there on the internet belittling undecided voters at this late date for being undecided. The implication is usually that such folks must be mentally defective in some way if they haven't committed to a candidate yet. I have no way of knowing, of course, but I would guess that a very large percentage of such voters are merely "undecided" only in the sense that they choose not to tell others of their preference, even the official pollsters. I don't blame them. I kind of subscribe to that view myself. My vote is personal. Sure, it wouldn't actually do any harm to say who I'm voting for, but I am under no obligation to make it known.
(Note: When I first published this I didn't realize my blogger account option to allow or not allow commenting on new posts was still set to NOT. I've corrected that situation so that now all posts will default to allowing comments unless I explicitly turn the feature off for any particular reason per post. I doubt anyone even tried to comment, but if you did I didn't want you to think there was anything more to it than just sheer stupidity/forgetfulness on my part.)
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