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Project Vote Smart leader says today’s political campaigns dirtier than ever

Political campaigns no longer are designed to inform voters, and instead teach us “to hate each other” through emotional attacks on opponents, Project Vote Smart co-founder Richard Kimball says.

He told a forum at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics on Thursday that politicians using dirty campaign tactics are nothing new, “but there has never been so many of them.”

Worse, “We haven’t just learned to tolerate them or expect them. We accept them. We encourage them. We support them. We vote for them. There’s no penalty, as there has been in the past, for misbehavior,” he said.