Vote Smart
non-profit, non-partisan research organization in the US
Vote Smart, formerly called Project Vote Smart, is an American nonprofit, non-partisan research organization that collects and distributes information on candidates for public office in the United States. It covers candidates and elected officials in six basic areas: background information, issue positions (via the Political Courage Test), voting records, campaign finances, interest group ratings, and speeches and public statements. This information is distributed via their web site, a toll-free phone number, and print publications. The founding president of the organization was Richard Kimball. Kimball became president emeritus in 2022, when Kyle Dell was announced as the new president of Vote Smart.
PVS also provides records of public statements, contact information for state and local election offices, polling place and absentee ballot information, ballot measure descriptions for each state (where applicable), links to federal and state government agencies, and links to political parties and issue organizations.
History
In 1986, Richard Kimball ran unsuccessfully for one of Arizona's two U.S. Senate seats. In a candidates' debate, he described the campaign process to prospective voters:
Understand what we do to you. We spend all of our time raising money, often from strangers we do not even know. Then we spend it in three specific ways: First we measure you, what it is you want to purchase in the political marketplace—just like Campbell's soup or Kellogg's cereal.
The public source identifies “Vote Smart” as non-profit, non-partisan research organization in the US. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Vote, Smart and non-profit.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7249368. VIAF identifies the subject as 153902558. The Library of Congress control number is no95013431. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2022 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vote Smart” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.