Politi-Score: 2,788 Reasons, Part 2

Do politicians tell more lies during an election, or off-election?   It seems the obvious answer is that they would tell more lies during an election campaign.  Let's see how much more, and how Democrats and Republicans compare overall, using the PolitiFact Politi-Score statistics.

This is how the *averages*  compare between the campaign and overall.  There were 2,788 rulings from PolitiFact's launch until the end of 2010.  These are compared to 414 rulings counted from September 1, 2010, until the election, November 2, 2010.  In otherwords, the 414 rulings are part of the 2,788 rulings.

Click "About This Blog" link to learn how these scores were computed.

Here is the information presented graphically, which displays how they compared by category by percent:  True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants on Fire, starting with Democrats.  In this chart, the Democrats are compared on a percentage basis during the 2010 election cycle to their percentage overall.  The Democrats had 1,184 total rulings including 200 rulings during their 2010 campaign.

Here are the Republicans for the same measure, who had 1,381 total rulings which included 192 rulings done during the 2010 election cycle:

Of note to me was that most of the ruling percentages seemed to align fairly close between the campaign and overall with the exception of True ratings by Democrats, which dropped significantly, from 23% overall to 9% during the campaign.

Finally, a comparison of the Republicans and the Democrats for the 2010 Campaign period only:

Please contact me through the comments with any suggestions for improvement or any questions as to how these numbers were calculated!  I have two photo-edit programs I used to create jpegs for these graphs (done in Excel).  One is relatively inexpensive (PrintMaster Platinum) and the other (U-Lead) is more expensive and sophisticated.  But it appears the PrintMaster makes better jpegs.  More lessons learned.

Conclusion:  Inconclusive, but possibly evidence of liberal bias at PolitiFact.  By this measure of PolitiFact rulings, Democrats have been on average 30% more truthful than Republicans; during the Campaign, they were on average 41% more truthful.  I guess if this is true, it doesn't help to tell the truth, at least this year.  That is, unless certain people can prove by a "preponderance of anecdotal evidence" that PolitiFact is indeed liberally biased.