Dear Editor,
Perry County voters need to make a careful examination of the candidates that we will all be voting for. Voters always do the best by doing their own vetting. Vetting means simply to do a "careful examination". The risk of trusting an organization to do the vetting for you, no matter how genuine they may seem, is that their vetting may be biased toward the candidates that they want elected.
How can you do your own vetting?
1. Get to know the candidates. Read what they have wrote or posted on line, especially their social media footprint. Don’t just “google” them, find out and read their own words.
2. Find out about their involvement in the local community where they will be serving. If they haven’t been involved, they won’t represent that community very well.
3. Ask your trusted friends why they feel the way they do about their candidates.
4. Call the candidate up yourself. If they want to be a public servant, they will gladly talk to you. Don’t be afraid to have those hard, straight forward, and honest conversations with the candidates. Refuse to believe lies about the candidates. Verify the truth.
5. Go to candidate forums, especially those public forums that invite all the candidates, not just hand-picked ones. The local Lincoln Days had almost every available candidate speaking at those events.
6. Beware of other people doing your vetting for you. Some organizations may be honorable but others want to sway your thinking to vote for the candidates that they want. Ask the vetting organization to see the questions they asked the candidates and to see the candidates’ answers. If the vetting organization isn’t transparent enough to share the questions and the answers from the candidate, they likely are a biased organization.
7. Be committed to personally verifying statements about the candidates. Just because a candidate seems trustworthy doesn’t necessarily mean that the candidate is trustworthy.
8. Ask family members and close neighbors of the candidates to tell you something about the candidate from their own relationship with the candidate.
9. Find out all the sources that the candidate has received money from, as well as who the candidate has given money to. Always follow the money!
10. Check out public records of the candidates, to find out all you can before voting for them.
This type of personal vetting cuts through the political rhetoric, blatant lies, and the manipulative vetting of biased organizations. It also gives you a huge sense of confidence when you step into the voting booth to cast your vote!
My involvement with the local Perry County Republican Club and the Republican Central Committee has proven to be a good source of observing candidates in real life situations, and a huge help in doing my own vetting.
After doing your own vetting, by all means get out and vote on August 6th.
Mark Renaud
Perryville
