In an election season, we often bemoan the low-information voter – the person who really doesn’t know that much about the issues or the candidates and goes to the polls having made a decision on the basis of trivia, or general feelings and impressions that don’t necessarily represent who the candidates really are or what they would do in office.
There’s no way Barack Obama would ever have become president without low-information voters.
But there’s another class of voters that may be just as dangerous, and perhaps we should call them the mis-information voters. They know a lot about the candidates. Unfortunately, much of what they know is simply not true.
You all know that I experienced this to the extreme when I ran for president four years ago. Anyone can come forward and claim anything about you, and if you’re not on the inside and you don’t know the facts it’s hard to tell a credible information source from a complete liar. (Although a good rule of thumb is not to believe anyone who presents their claims sitting next to Gloria Allred.)
But these distinctions hardly matter to the news media. Once a notion is “out there,” they’re not as interested in distinguishing truth from fiction as they are in judging how the candidate “handles” the narrative. Something that’s out there could be total nonsense, but if the candidate doesn’t employ the exact damage control strategy the media thinks is correct, then they feel they have license to treat the information as if it’s true, and the candidate as if he or she is convicted in the media court.
And it doesn’t even have to be a big scandal or a salacious personal matter. It can be something relatively insignificant, or something from the person’s history where you simply aren’t getting the whole story. A few examples that are currently in play:
It’s out there that Carly Fiorina laid off 30,000 people at Hewlett-Packard. And yes she did, but it’s only part of the story. As CEO, it was her job to make good decisions about the company’s costs and the size of its workforce. And because she made that move, she positioned the company for the creation of many more jobs and much better profits later on.
It’s out there that Ben Carson did fetal tissue research. It’s also completely false. Dr. Carson is a neurosurgeon, not an abortionist. After an operation, he would deliver salvageable tissue from his patients to researchers. He did not do any research on fetal tissue.
It’s out there that Donald Trump was warned by Fox News chief Roger Ailes that there would be “war” if Trump made any further criticisms of Megyn Kelly. But where did this come from? Neither Ailes nor Trump has confirmed this, and in fact Trump says it never happened.
It’s out there that Scott Walker was under investigation by prosecutors in Wisconsin for violating campaign laws. The part of the story you often don’t hear is that the so-called investigation was clearly partisan in nature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered it stopped without anyone being found to have done anything wrong.
It’s out there that Ted Cruz is constitutionally ineligible to be president. It’s also nonsense. Cruz was born in Canada, but you can still be a natural-born citizen if you were born outside the U.S. to at least one citizen parent, and Cruz was. This is a non-story but people still talk about it as if it’s relevant.
It’s out there that Rick Perry was indicted for abuse of his power as governor of Texas. What you don’t hear is that there’s nothing to the indictment. A Texas public official was guilty of gross misconduct and was refusing to resign. Perry threatened to use his line-item veto to defund the official’s office unless and until she did. So he was indicted for using his veto power to remove a public official guilty of misconduct. Some scandal that is.
Stories like these present a challenge for voters, because you do want to be aware of real information that affects a candidate’s fitness for office, but you don’t want to get taken in by baseless nonsense. It starts with considering the source, if you even know who the source is. Be very careful when media cite anonymous sources, and they do this a lot because people who aren’t authorized to be talking about something want to do so anyway. Why would you trust someone who will say something but won’t be held accountable for its accuracy because they can hide behind anonymity?
This is especially bad in the age of social media. You’ll see some political journalist on Twitter with something like, “Source: Perry has corruption problem.” What source? What problem? They get half-baked information they can’t even verify, but they’re so desperate to be first with the story, they just run with it.
Whenever you hear stuff like that, wait for verifiable facts to back up the claim before you put any stock in it.
Also: When you see on the Internet that someone said something, check it out. I’ll be fair to the other side here. There’s a meme going around on social media that quotes Bernie Sanders as saying his mission in life is to “dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Now from what I know of Bernie Sanders, he does want to do the latter. I hope he doesn’t want to do the former (not that he could), but at any rate the quote is made up. He never said it. Be careful about stuff you see.
And finally, when people come out of the woodwork claiming they had a personal experience with some candidate, wait for them to prove their claims. And be a tough judge of “information” they offer as proof. It’s not always true that “when there’s smoke, there’s fire,” but that flimsy standard of proof seems to be good enough for a lot of people.
Be informed. Don’t be misinformed. Much of the media doesn’t do a very good job these days of checking out the information it runs with, so you have no choice but to exercise your own discretion. Otherwise your vote might be just as ill-advised as those low-information voters who didn’t know much of anything at all.
It doesn’t do you much good to know stuff if what you know just ain’t so.
