The truth may set you free, but lies will put our freedom at risk if we don't guard against them.On this July Fourth, the nation is awash in unapologetic lies. As Americans, we can all show true patriotism by working to keep ourselves informed and ensure that when we vote, our choices are not swayed by outright deceits. Verify before you trust.Politicians have lied about various things for as long as there have been politicians. But America has entered an age in which lies can spread far more effectively, especially via social media. The devastating weight of endless dishonest fabrications threatens to sink political discourse into a miasmic cesspool.How is this happening? Hostile governments, for one, can easily peddle falsehoods to try and shape American politics — for example, Russia’s spread of misinformation about U.S. immigration and border security, apparently meant to weaken support for aid to Ukraine. Unlimited money, much of it from anonymous sources, is pouring into politics to support the vast dissemination of deceptions. The internet spreads informational snake oil more widely and quickly than ever. The Fairness Doctrine hasn't been around since 1987, allowing some prominent media outlets (think of Fox News casting aspersions on Dominion Voting Systems after the 2020 election) to spread disinformation without offering robust countering opinions. And online, hordes of trolls, malevolent bots and junk "news" schemers are everywhere. Editorial Editorial Those who propagate lies and evasions — including, at the national level, a former president who made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his term and continues to make them a staple of his current campaign — count on people not knowing the facts, and hope to use that knowledge gap to keep people from making sensible decisions when they vote or engage in other civic functions. The end result: the truth ends up buried by lies, so that elections and democracy are no longer based on the best ideas and a consensus formed around truth. And just as a piano teacher tells students learning a new piece to play slowly because mistakes are hard to unlearn, it's difficult to change misinformation after people have absorbed it without realizing it isn't true.Elections officials in Chicago, Cook County and the state are all concerned about the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation — about election workers, mail-in voting, voting machines, even the ink on mail-in ballots — ahead of the November election."I think it’s a real danger to our democracy that we won’t have a very well informed citizenry going to the polls," Barbara Laimins, co-chair of a task force on misinformation and disinformation for the League of Women Voters of Illinois, told the Sun-Times in May. Related Misinformation is a ‘real danger to our democracy.’ What can election boards do about it? It shouldn’t be so hard to become an educated voter ‘The only guardian of true liberty’In a 1789 letter to Lafayette, George Washington cited honesty as one of the things that "are necessary to make us a great and happy people."But when many people care not a whit for honesty, it is up to the rest of us to remember our civic duty to stay informed. That means, first and foremost, building "information literacy" by getting news and information from a variety of reliable sources that carefully fact-check what they report. The nonprofit News Literacy Project has an array of tools that can help people learn how to vet their news and separate truth from lies. (For more, go to newslit.org/for-everyone/)Learning to combat misinformation and disinformation is time-consuming for people with responsibilities and busy lives. But we must arm ourselves so strongly with honesty that the lies pass over us like an idle wind.The task of ferreting out the truth becomes ever harder as the sources of lies and distortions grow in power and reach. The risk is that many people will feel so disoriented that they either hesitate to trust any news source, or start feeling there is no discernible reality at all. Instead, they opt to remain stuck in one or another political camp, belief system, silo or echo chamber, impervious to logical argument. Welcome, tyranny. Goodbye life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.James Madison, who is traditionally viewed as the father of the U.S. Constitution, said, "[P]eople who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives" and that "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge" is "the only Guardian of true liberty."It's not easy to mentally fact-check each statement when politicians, online posts or brazenly biased media sources bound from blatant lie to blatant lie, like a bighorn sheep leaping from crag to crag in the Rocky Mountains.But knowing the facts when a politician is cynically spewing disinformation is the only way to cast a wise vote, and the only way to protect the republic we have fought for and honored since its inception.Send letters to letters@suntimes.comThe Democracy Solutions Project is a collaboration among the Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ and the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government, with funding support from the Pulitzer Center. Our goal is to help listeners and readers engage with the democratic functions in their lives and cast an informed ballot in the November 2024 election.Learn more about the Sun-Times Editorial Board at chicago.suntimes.com/about/editorial-board