This election has been hard on all of our inboxes.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's (cut and pasted) head on a patriotically bikini'd bod? Sen. Barack Obama cluelessly chatting on a (Photoshopped) upside-down phone? Sen. John McCain identifying himself — according to a totally mangled forward — as a "war criminal"?

Gotta be fakes, all of them. Right?

Because why would a grown man hold a phone upside down — well, then again, it wouldn't be the first time a politician was a doofus maximus. So maybe, just to be on the safe side. ...

Which is why no inbox has had it harder in these past frenzied weeks than the one belonging to David and Barbara Mikkelson, the founders and sole researchers at urban legend mega-site www.Snopes.com.

The couple debunked each of the myths above, along with dozens more allegations ranging from the wacko (a claim that the Bible identifies Obama as the Antichrist) to the wonko (a widely circulated comparison of the two candidates' tax plans).

One query was e-mailed by dozens of concerned readers. Branded as a series of Palin quotes, the document contained such ramblers as, "God made dinosaurs ... so that when they died and became petroleum products we, in his perfect image, could use them in our snow machines, pickup trucks and fishing boats."

This text, as you may have suspected, is meant to be a joke. The Mikkelsons traced it to a blog labeling it as satire, not once but three separate times.

And yet, the e-mails came: "Does Sarah Palin really believe that dinosaurs are lizards of the devil?"

"After you've received a few hundred e-mails like these," David Mikkelson says, "you figure that even if it looks obvious, it's not obvious to everyone. ... There's never anything so ridiculous that at least some people won't believe it."

A 2-PERSON OPERATION

Snopes receives 6.3 million site visits a month, according to media measurement company Quantcast, and about 600 e-mailed research requests a day from desperate voters who don't know what to believe.

"Usually it's around 400," says Barbara Mikkelson, 49. "But, election season." She sighs.

"A lot of people don't realize," David, 48, says wearily, "that our site is just two people."

Working out of their living room.

And so the confused masses write. And writeandwriteandwrite. Not always about politics, though in recent weeks politics has dominated the site. Forget about Cokelore, forget about Glurge — two classic Snopes categories. Currently Palin, Obama, Sen. Joe Biden and McCain, in that order, top the "Hottest 25 Legends," a compilation updated daily of the terms generating the most reader e-mails and user searches.

This confused and earnest quest for the truth is why the Mikkelsons refuse to classify any request as stupid. It's not about stupidity. It's about desperation. Studies have shown that people will believe anything that's repeated multiple times, which, in these days of mass e-mails, constitutes just about everything. It makes getting to the bottom of something a battle between our real desire for truth and the limits of our neurological makeup.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Occasionally, the most bizarro queries end up being true. Sort of. Yes, Barack Obama DID say that he'd visited 57 states during his campaign. But according to the video footage David and Barbara provide, it appears to be a flub born of exhaustion: He had actually visited 47. The Mikkelsons found no evidence, FYI, that Obama was secretly referring to the 57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Each of their sources is cited, each of their entries is marked with a color-coded circle standing for true or false (and occasionally, undetermined).

Ah, Snopes. What a stalwart it has become, a sort of go-to intellectual Drano clearing out the apocryphal political sewage that clogs our brains more and more each day.

Such oracle-like power was not the original intent of David and Barbara, who met in 1994 on a user group dedicated to discussing urban legends. Barbara moved from Ottawa to be with David, setting up a rudimentary Snopes in their Los Angeles area home. Their site takes its name from a particularly pernicious family peopling a William Faulkner trilogy — and papering academia with hundreds of doctoral dissertations.

A few years ago, David left his job as a computer programmer to join his wife in full-time myth-busting (income is from ad space purchased on the site), and recently they hired an assistant whose sole job is reading through the massive piles of nutty that seem to signify everything from mudslinging partisanship to the death of satire.

Just the other day, they received a note from someone wanting to know the veracity of a newscast entitled "2008 Election Results Leaked," in which a voter complains, "If you can't trust the shadowy overlords that run your election, who can you trust?"

The video was from the Onion, a satirical newspaper whose current headlines include "No One on SWAT Team Wants to Wait in Ventilation Duct With Howard."

The Mikkelsons, who consider themselves apolitical — Barbara's still Canadian — opted not to debunk that particular story. They try to reserve precious Snopesifying man-hours for the stories they think have the most legs, the highest likelihood of going viral.