SANTA FE (KRQE) – Every election season, voters get bombarded with political ads. Whether it’s on TV, radio or straight to their mailboxes, many ads are negative. But one lawmaker says it’s time to monitor those campaign ads to determine if they’re true or false.

State Sen. Howie Morales believes voters are fed up with the mudslinging and all of those attack ads and that it’s time to bring in the truth police.

“People are tired of the attack ads,” said Morales, a Democrat from Silver City.He introduced Senate Bill 675, the Truth in Political Advertising Act.

“When it comes to campaign advertising, it seems that it’s so easy to go in to mislead the voter, put information out that is flat out not true, and all I’m trying to do here is humbly try to bring integrity back to the election process and campaign advertisement side of it,” said Morales.

“Long term is that we would have the ability for possibly our three universities, our research universities, to take every ad that’s put out there and really just look and see as for the verification of how truthful that it is,” he said.

According to the bill, a review agency would review an advertisement and score the ad on two scales: for truth or falsity and whether the ad is misleading. A score of one would be false or misleading; a score of five would be truthful and “not at all misleading.” The score would appear as part of the ad.

“I think the best voter is a well-armed voter with the truth, and that’s all I’m trying to do in this attempt,” he said.

KRQE News 13 asked Morales about the constitutionality of the bill.

“There’s going to be some challenges that come in that can show whether it is or not, but again, I think the intent is to bring out the discussion and see what it is that we can do to have some consequences that are in place for those that are putting out information that just is not true,” he responded.

Ads that are not presented to the board would be subject to fines.

Isabella Garcia y Lauer, a voter, said, “It gets really repetitive after awhile when you’re watching all of those ads, and it’s just, ‘Oh, this person, is that really true or not?’ “

But the fact-checking process would come at a $5 million annual cost.

Delbert Quintana, one voter who welcomed the bill said, “If it costs $5 million to get the truth out of people, then that’s what we’ll have to do.”

A similar idea has generated controversy. Last year a federal judge in Ohio struck down a state law that required truth in political advertising.