Counting the U.S. debate’s lies—in Skittles

One U.S. presidential debate down, two to go. The second tete-a-tete in this wild U.S. election campaign kicks off on Sunday, October 9 at St. Louis’s Washington University at 9 pm. And because it has been fraught with brazen falsehoods from both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, Maclean’s is bringing back the Skittles Meter—a measure of the debate’s outright lies, counted in the candy most closely associated with the campaign. Here’s what it looked like last time.

Here’s how it works:

1. A team of Maclean’s editors will closely follow and verify the fact-checking from a curated list of trusted sources on Twitter and elsewhere. That list, which makes up a good chunk of this fact-checking aggregation, is here.

2. Every time a fact-checker notes a lie*, we’ll add a blue (Clinton) or red (Trump) Skittle to the appropriate space, and write the offending lie—and the correct fact—on the whiteboard.

3. We’ll tweet a link to the fact-check from our Twitter account @SkittlesMeter.

Follow macleans.ca for more after the debate for analysis and an aggregation of all the lies, to find out who won (or, really, lost) the candy conflict.