Voters who fail to fact check ads may be fooled this election

FORT MYERS, Fla.- Voters beware: Not everything you hear in the political ads fighting to get your attention this election season may be true.

“All we can do is put the information out there, make it available to the voter,” said Joshua Gillin, a writer for PolitiFact, part of an independent team of researchers fact-checking candidates.

Gillin points out one example of misleading information in an advertisement by Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Patrick Murphy:

“Rubio wrote the toughest sanctions on Hezbollah ever passed. Wait a second, Marco Rubio didn’t show up for that vote.”

Gillin says the sanctions mentioned passed with unanimous consent, “it’s pretty common when something advances through unanimous consent that the senator or the sponsor is not actually there.”

Francis Rooney, who is running for Congress to replace Curt Clawson in the House of Representatives, is running a political ad claiming “Obama still wants to let unvetted Syrians in.”

The ad goes on to say “allowing unvetted Syrians into our country is a risk we simply can’t take.”

Gillin says the ad fails to mention refugees are indeed vetted and the process, which can begin at the United Nations, often takes years.

“The process for any refugee can take up to a year or more, and in the case of a Syrian refugee, actually we’re talking two years or more,” Gillin explained.

Yet Gillin says because most voters don’t research their candidates, lying works.

“Lies in politics are nothing new. Even just exaggerations about certain claims, that’s obviously nothing new.”

Though it may be difficult to tell when there’s misleading information being fed to voters through an ad, Gillin says to look out for three things:

• Claims of what a candidate has done
• Who’s said to be an ally of that candidate
• The constant repetition of a particular claim