Every few months, it seems, we get another story that makes us do a double-take. A city councilor in Maine turns out to have an extensive criminal history. A congressman fabricated essentially his entire resume. A school board member lied about their credentials. And we’re left asking the same question: How did nobody check this?

The latest example comes from Lewiston, Maine, where City Councilor Aman Osman is facing calls to resign after reports surfaced about his criminal background—including convictions that weren’t disclosed during his campaign. It’s a familiar pattern. Remember George Santos, the New York congressman who invented college degrees, Wall Street jobs, and even a fake charity? Or Ian Andre Roberts in Massachusetts, who served on a school committee despite misrepresenting his background?

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re symptoms of something bigger: we don’t actually vet the people running for office.

The Honor System, Literally

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in most of America, anyone can run for local office with virtually no background screening. No fingerprints. No credit checks. No verification of the resume you’re campaigning on. You file some paperwork, maybe gather a few signatures, and you’re on the ballot.

The assumption—and it’s a big one—is that voters will do their own research. That local media will investigate. That opponents will expose any skeletons during the campaign. Democracy as a self-correcting mechanism.

Sometimes that works. George Santos eventually got caught, though only after he’d already been elected to Congress and sworn in. But how many others slip through? How many local officials are serving right now with backgrounds that would disqualify them from being a bank teller or a TSA agent?

What Other Professions Require

The contrast with other fields is stark. Want to work at a bank? You’re getting fingerprinted and running through the FBI’s database. Applying to be a police officer? Background investigators will interview your neighbors, former employers, and probably that teacher who gave you detention in eighth grade.

Healthcare workers need state licenses verified. Lawyers face character and fitness reviews by the bar. Even hairstylists need to prove they completed their training before they can legally cut hair for money.

But city councilor? State representative? School board member? In most places, you just need to be old enough, live in the district, and convince enough people to vote for you.

The Money They Control

Here’s where it gets really wild: these unvetted officials often gain immediate access to staggering amounts of public money and governmental programs.

A city councilor in a mid-sized city might oversee budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. They vote on contracts, approve expenditures, and influence how taxpayer money flows through everything from infrastructure projects to social services. School board members control district budgets that can exceed a billion dollars in large systems—hiring decisions, construction contracts, technology purchases.

At the state and federal level, the numbers become almost incomprehensible. Members of Congress sit on committees that oversee entire federal agencies with trillion-dollar budgets. They have access to classified information. They influence grant programs, defense contracts, healthcare spending, and infrastructure investments that reshape entire regions.

George Santos, before his fabricated background was exposed, served on the House Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He had access to briefings, influence over legislation affecting billions in federal spending, and a vote on matters of national importance. Nobody verified his college degree or his supposed Wall Street career before giving him that access.

Think about that for a moment: a person who lied about virtually everything on their resume had more access to federal programs and spending than most federal employees—who all had to pass background checks to get their jobs.

The Programs and Access Points

Local officials often control or influence:

• Municipal bonds and debt instruments worth tens of millions
• Police department budgets and contracts
• Urban development and housing programs
• Local emergency management and disaster relief funds
• Public health departments and crisis response systems

State legislators and officials have their hands on:

• Medicaid programs worth billions in each state
• Transportation and infrastructure budgets
• State pension funds managing retirement money for hundreds of thousands of workers
• Emergency relief funds and natural disaster response
• Economic development incentives and tax abatements for corporations

Federal officials? The scale becomes difficult to comprehend:

• Defense budgets exceeding $800 billion annually
• Medicare and Medicaid programs serving over 100 million Americans
• Social Security affecting virtually every American family
• Foreign aid and international development programs
• Federal Reserve policies affecting the global economy

And we let people access all of this—vote on it, influence it, sometimes directly control aspects of it—without verifying they are who they claim to be.

The Irony of It All

Here’s the absurd part: if you want to work for these officials—as a staff member, an aide, or an administrator—you’ll likely need a background check. Congressional staffers with access to classified information go through security clearance processes. City employees handling municipal funds often need to be bonded and background-checked.

But the elected officials themselves? The ones actually voting on the budgets, signing the contracts, and setting the policies? They waltz right in based solely on vote count.

A clerk processing a $5,000 check at city hall needs a background check. The councilor approving a $50 million construction contract? Not necessarily.

An entry-level Pentagon employee needs months of security vetting to access classified systems. A congressman with access to intelligence briefings and national security information? If they win their election, they’re in—regardless of their financial history, personal associations, or whether anything they’ve said about themselves is actually true.

How This Actually Happens

The Aman Osman situation in Lewiston illustrates how these oversights occur. Local races often fly under the radar. Campaigns operate on shoestring budgets. Local newspapers—the traditional watchdogs—have been decimated by industry collapse. Opposition research is something that happens in big-money congressional races, not city council contests where the winner might get elected with a few hundred votes.

George Santos succeeded partly because he ran in a swing district where national parties focused on messaging and turnout, not candidate vetting. By the time reporters started digging into his biography, he’d already won. The Republican Party hadn’t thoroughly vetted him during the primary because, well, nobody thought to. The honor system failed.

Ian Andre Roberts’ case in Massachusetts highlighted another gap: school committee races where candidates often run unopposed or face minimal scrutiny. These hyperlocal positions can have enormous impact—controlling budgets, hiring superintendents, setting curriculum—yet operate almost entirely outside public attention until something goes wrong.

Meanwhile, these officials immediately gain access to budget discussions, contract negotiations, and program oversight worth exponentially more than most of them will earn in salary. A city councilor might make $15,000 a year but vote on contracts worth $15 million. A state representative earning a part-time salary of $40,000 might sit on committees overseeing billion-dollar agency budgets.

What’s the Standard Today?

The current standard is essentially: caveat emptor. Voter beware.

Some states require candidates to disclose financial information—assets, debts, sources of income. The idea is to expose potential conflicts of interest. But these disclosures are often filed on paper, stored in dusty filing cabinets at town halls, and rarely examined unless someone goes looking.

A handful of jurisdictions require criminal background checks for certain positions, particularly those working with vulnerable populations. Some states disqualify people with felony convictions from holding office, though these laws vary wildly and often carry their own problems.

At the federal level, Congress members face basically zero vetting beyond constitutional requirements: be at least 25 (for House) or 30 (for Senate), be a U.S. citizen for at least seven or nine years respectively, and live in the state you represent. That’s it. Congress has historically resisted any external vetting process, viewing it as an infringement on legislative independence.

The only real consequence for lying about your background is political embarrassment—and maybe losing the next election. By that time, you’ve already had access to everything.

Could This Change?

There are a few ways this could work differently, though each comes with tradeoffs:

Mandatory disclosure and verification: Require all candidates to submit resumes, educational credentials, and employment history—then actually verify it, the way employers do. Make criminal records public, not as automatic disqualifiers but as information voters deserve to know. Given the money and programs these officials will control, this seems like bare minimum due diligence.

Tiered background checks based on access: Officials with access to classified information, massive budgets, or sensitive programs could face more thorough vetting—similar to security clearances in other government roles. If you’re going to vote on defense spending or sit on intelligence committees, maybe we should know if you have massive debts or questionable foreign contacts.

Financial competency standards: If you’re going to oversee billion-dollar budgets, perhaps demonstrating basic financial literacy isn’t too much to ask. We require CPAs to pass exams before they can audit companies. Why not require some baseline competency verification for officials controlling public money?

Background checks for finalists: Once someone wins a primary or gets on the general election ballot, trigger a basic background screening—the kind any corporate job requires. Give voters the results before Election Day. The challenge here is timing and who conducts these checks impartially.

Post-election verification with consequences: Allow people to run freely, but require background checks before they’re sworn in, with serious penalties for material misrepresentations. This is closer to how things work now, except the “consequences” part is usually just political embarrassment rather than actual legal ramifications.

Professional standards boards: Create nonpartisan bodies that review candidate qualifications without having power to remove them from ballots—only to issue public findings. Think of it like a credit rating, not a pass/fail test. At minimum, voters should know if the person promising to manage a $200 million city budget has ever successfully managed money before.

The Counterarguments

The pushback to all of this usually centers on a few points:

Democracy means voters decide: If a community wants to elect someone with a criminal record because they believe in second chances, or because that person genuinely represents their interests, that’s their prerogative. Background checks could become tools to exclude people unfairly—particularly those from marginalized communities who might have minor criminal records.

Who watches the watchers?: Any vetting process creates a new layer of bureaucracy with its own potential for abuse. Who decides what constitutes a “disqualifying” background? What stops this from becoming a political weapon?

Constitutional concerns: At the federal level especially, imposing requirements beyond what the Constitution specifies could raise serious legal questions about who has the power to add qualifications for office.

These are legitimate concerns. But there’s a difference between disqualifying someone and simply requiring disclosure. Between preventing candidates from running and making sure voters know what they’re voting for. Between excluding people and verifying that what they’re claiming is actually true.

The Real Question

Maybe the question isn’t whether we can vet candidates better—we obviously can, since we do it for countless other positions of far less responsibility. The question is whether we want to, and what we’re willing to trade off to make it happen.

We require rigorous background checks for people handling modest amounts of money in banks, credit unions, and financial institutions. We demand credentials verification for healthcare workers, lawyers, and licensed professionals whose decisions affect individual lives.

Yet we allow completely unvetted individuals—people whose backgrounds we know nothing about, whose credentials might be fabricated, whose financial histories could include fraud or bankruptcies—to control governmental programs affecting millions of people and budgets measured in billions of dollars.

A bank teller handling $10,000 needs fingerprints and an FBI check. A city councilor voting on $10 million contracts? Often just needs enough yard signs.

The Trust Deficit

Part of what makes this so frustrating is that it contributes to the broader erosion of trust in government. When people discover their elected officials lied about their backgrounds, or when officials with checkered pasts gain access to massive amounts of public money, it reinforces cynicism about the whole system.

“They’re all corrupt anyway.” “Nobody cares about qualifications anymore.” “The whole thing is rigged.”

These aren’t attitudes we should encourage. But the current non-system practically invites them.

Moving Forward

Maybe we can’t—and shouldn’t—prevent anyone from running for office based on their background. The whole point of democracy is that the people decide, not gatekeepers and credentialing boards.

But we can do better than the honor system for people who will control access to billions in taxpayer money and programs affecting millions of lives.

At minimum:

• Verify that educational credentials and work history are real
• Conduct criminal background checks and make results public
• Review financial histories for people who will vote on budgets and contracts
• Require disclosure of foreign contacts for positions with national security implications
• Create real penalties for material misrepresentations

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about having any standard at all beyond “won the election.”

Because right now, we’re essentially saying: we trust you to manage billions of dollars in public money, oversee complex governmental programs, and make decisions affecting countless lives—but we don’t trust you enough to verify you are who you say you are.

That seems backwards.

We require background checks for people handling money, carrying guns, and cutting hair. Maybe—just maybe—the people making laws, spending tax dollars, and controlling access to governmental programs affecting every American deserve at least the same scrutiny we give to bank tellers.

That seems like a pretty low bar for democracy to clear.