[Editor’s note: Dr. Ann Wyman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Missouri Southern.]

If Toyota advertised a car for sale that got 500 miles to the gallon, truth-in-advertising law would kick in and require Toyota to pull the ad. But if a political candidate makes a false or misleading claim, there is no law to make him or her take it back. So it’s no surprise that some political candidates do lie or mislead.

Several attempts to limit false claims have been made, but the Supreme Court has declined to allow restrictions on our First Amendment right to free speech in election campaigns – it’s too slippery a slope to start deciding what candidates can and cannot say. So that means it’s up to us to sort through the claims of candidates and separate what’s true from what’s false. The combined campaign expenditures of all candidates running in the 2004 presidential election amounted to more than $880 million, and the current presidential candidates’ total is expected to hit $1 billion. That buys a lot of political advertisements and speeches for us to run through our personal truth-o-meters. For those of us who don’t have enough spare time between now and Election Day to research the accuracy of candidates’ statements, there’s fact-checking help available.

For those political rumors that circulate on the Internet, you can go to www.snopes.com to find out which are true and which are false. Snopes researches Internet rumors in general, not just political ones. There is also www.factcheck.org that investigates political advertisements and candidates’ speeches. It has been around since the 2004 election, and although Vice President Dick Cheney first referred voters to it, most Democrats consider it a pretty reliable source as well. A newer Internet site called www.politifact.com also fact-checks political ads and speeches, and while its reliability hasn’t been as thoroughly tested as www.factcheck.org, it has a “pants-on-fire” category for particularly blatant lies that is worth a look. Some major newspapers and newsmagazines will also be fact-checking the candidates as Election Day draws near. By comparing sources, you can even fact-check the fact-checkers. Or, if you really get into it, you can fact-check the people who are fact-checking the fact-checkers. Fact-check, then vote.