Covering the local election in my town taught me to always check the candidate's actual voting record...

I was writing a piece for our small paper about a mayoral race last fall, and the headline everyone ran with was about a candidate's 'bold new housing plan.' I spent a whole afternoon digging through old city council meeting minutes online... turns out he'd voted against three different affordable housing projects over the past two years. The 'plan' was just a press release. Now I never trust a campaign promise without looking at the archived votes first. Has anyone else found a huge gap between the headline and the actual history on a story like this?

4 comments

4 Comments

zara_sanchez27d ago

My cousin ran for school board last year and her whole thing was about fixing the playgrounds. Checked the meeting records and she missed every single vote on the parks budget, lol. Sometimes the record is just empty.

emery_jackson2927d ago

Missing votes doesn't always mean an empty record though.

the_viola27d ago

Agree with emery_jackson29, an empty record tells its own story too.

wood.uma9d ago

Wait, she missed every single vote on the thing she was running on? How does that even work? You can't just skip the meetings and then say you're the person to fix it. That's not a gap, that's a canyon.