It's Voter-Fooling Time in America

The New York Times | Editorial

Friday 20 October 2006

The homestretch of the campaign season historically puts treacherous distortions of the truth before the voters, none more so this year than a mysterious California letter informing thousands of Latino-Americans that immigrants have no right to vote. "You are advised," begins the Spanish-language letter, dripping with authority, that if "you're an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in incarceration." It now appears that someone in a Republican Congressional campaign conjured a contemporary spin on a classic scare tactic from torchlight politics.

Comparable outrages surface daily now, with an ad for black voters in six states misrepresenting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s politics in a staged chat between two black women: "Dr. King was a real man," says one actress. "You know he was a Republican," the other chimes in.

Democrats are no less tempted to flash bare-knuckle mischief. In a prime example, Representative Nancy Johnson, a Connecticut Republican, is being portrayed by Chris Murphy, the Democrat, as heartlessly unresponsive to a woman whose child needed insurance coverage for a cleft lip and palate. Of course, Ms. Johnson has represented Mr. Murphy as being opposed to the surveillance of terrorists.

So it goes, with some ethically challenged spinners creating false news clippings and tucking them knifelike into campaign videos of real stories. Even Lincoln is being falsely quoted by defenders of the Iraq war. The 16th president never said that Congressional critics who damage wartime morale "should be arrested, exiled or hanged."

One of the more widespread canards is rooted in the divisive and fruitless immigration debate. Democrats in more than two dozen races are being falsely accused of wanting to give Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants - a distortion of a proposal to actually block immigrants from being credited for benefit days worked before they had legal status. One Web site coated with obvious racism and xenophobia is MuchasGraciasDebbie.com, which skewers Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, dressing her digitally in a sombrero, grinning and declaring, "No problema!"

What to do, beyond celebrating the continuing pungency of free speech across the nation? The most obvious answer is that voters need to pay ever closer attention to what the candidates say in this world of mixed media and mixed messages. The Internet is a powerful ally.

The head of Google, Eric Schmidt, is cautioning politicians stuck in the sound-bite era that "truth predictor" software is in the works so that computer-wise voters will be instantaneously able to check on the probability, if not the certainty, of what candidates claim as fact. Actually, careful parsing of egregiously misleading campaign ads is already available on the Web at factcheck.org, a nonprofit service that thinks voters should be treated as intelligent consumers entitled to the plain facts. If only the candidates saw it that way.

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