I compiled these numbers by hand-counting recent entries on PolitiFact; none of the fact-checking sites maintain an overall "veracity meter" for each campaign. When I asked Brooks Jackson, who heads FactCheck.org, and Bill Adair, who directs PolitiFact, to judge which campaign was being more dishonest, both declined to do so. "I have no objective way of measuring the degree of mendacity in any political statement, let alone in any campaign," Jackson told me. Adair compared his job to that of a baseball umpire, and my question, he said, was like asking an ump, "Are the Tampa Bay Rays safe at first more often than they're out?" Adair said he didn't object to my counting up all the lies for each campaign, but he noted that the process was not scientific—PolitiFact uses its own judgment in deciding which statements to investigate, so its sampling of politicians' statements isn't random.