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UA interns at Project Vote Smart are becoming a significant resource for voters in the 2008 elections.

By University Communications
February 4, 2008

University of Arizona students are playing a significant role in developing one of the most comprehensive sources of information about elected officials and candidates running for public office.

When discerning voters want to get objective facts on voting records, issue positions and campaign finance histories of their elected officials, they turn more and more to Project Vote Smart, the nation's premier political research organization.

Project Vote Smart recently moved a significant part of its research operations to the UA campus, involving students and faculty in compiling and analyzing the data for which Project Vote Smart has become famous. The result is a unique educational experience for UA students in journalism, communication, political science, sociology and other disciplines.

The crown jewel of Project Vote Smart’s efforts is its “Voter Self Defense System,” a free online resource that includes comprehensive information on more than 40,000 elected officials and political candidates.

In January 2007, Project Vote Smart opened a research center in a small house on the UA campus. It's the only such center located outside the organization's rural Montana headquarters.

According to Adelaide Elm Kimball, Project Vote Smart board member and senior adviser, the organization successfully recruits volunteers and interns to serve in Montana, but they do experience some limitations – such as not being near libraries, airports and major news organizations.

Moving to the UA allows Project Vote Smart, which was originally founded in Tucson prior to the 1992 elections, to tap into all of the University’s on-campus resources, and also recruit interns unable to spend a semester or summer in the Montana Rockies. “We always wanted Project Vote Smart to have a presence at the UA, where we started,” Kimball said.

The UA site allows Project Vote Smart to recruit student interns and volunteers year-round. Currently, about 45 UA students intern at Project Vote Smart each semester, and Kimball hopes to eventually double that number.

Interns commit to working at least 135 hours during their internship. While many of the interns are predictably political science majors, UA students studying journalism, science, history, sociology and other disciplines also have chosen to intern at Project Vote Smart.

“Politics is of enduring interest because it touches people’s lives, and with our electoral cycles students get bombarded with political messages and want to learn more about it,” said Bill Dixon, head of the UA political science department. “Having Project Vote Smart involved with the University provides an additional way students can learn about the political process. It provides an added dimension to the political science curriculum that students can’t get elsewhere.”

The focus of the UA facility is almost entirely on research. Student interns are responsible for:

• Collecting records of every vote made by every state legislator in the country.
• Researching and obtaining ratings by special interest groups and advocacy organizations for everyone in Congress or a state legislature.
• Gathering all of the speeches and public statements made by 2008 presidential candidates – all 200 candidates that have filed to run for this election. This information will allow voters to access what every candidate has said on every major domestic, foreign policy and social issue, and how those statements vary based on when and where they were delivered.

“The speeches and public statements program is an invaluable and unique service for citizens around the country,” Kimball said. “I don’t know of any other organization that is collecting that information. It is a way to track whether a candidate is being consistent on an issue.”

Students gain exposure to the political system, develop their research skills and enjoy an opportunity to be involved in truly nonpartisan politics.

“Project Vote Smart is completely nonpartisan and the internships get students to be skeptical, to inquire, to look beyond campaign rhetoric and figure out where candidates stand.”

Many student interns have returned for a second internship, a volunteer position or permanent employment at Project Vote Smart. About 30 percent of the paid staff at the Montana facility are former interns.

Student interns provide the public with an invaluable resource that cannot be found anywhere else in America – free and unfiltered information about every candidate in or running for president, congress, governor or the state legislature.

Kimball calls the work that interns and volunteers do at Project Vote Smart one of the few good stories in American politics today. There is no other nonpartisan organization collecting this type and amount of information about political candidates and elected officials, and there is no other university in the country that provides an opportunity for its students to make this type of contribution to the electoral process, Kimball said.