Vote Smart, formerly called Project Vote Smart, is an American nonprofit, non-partisan^[3][4] 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.^[5]

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.

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:

Vote Smart says that it does not accept contributions from corporations, labor unions, political parties, or other organizations that lobby, support or oppose candidates or issues.^[13] Donors to the organization have included the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.^[14]

Individual contributors are considered members, and are given the opportunity to visit their headquarters where they work as research volunteers alongside interns and staff.^[15]

The Political Courage Test^[16] (formerly the National Political Awareness Test, NPAT) is an American initiative intended to increase transparency in American politics.

It is part of the voter education organization Vote Smart's candidate information program. With a view towards elections, the test seeks to obtain answers from election candidates, describing their respective stances on a variety of popular issues in American politics. This information is then made available to voters in a selection-driven, standardized format.

In 2008, Project Vote Smart kicked John McCain off the organization's board due to his refusal to fill out the Political Courage Test.^[17]

The response to the Political Courage Test has dropped, from 72% in 1996 to 48% in 2008^[18] and even further to 20% by 2016,^[19] because politicians from both parties are afraid that challengers will use their responses out of context in attack ads, according to The Wall Street Journal. Rep. Anne Gannon, Democratic leader pro tempore of the Florida House of Representatives, stated: "We tell our candidates not to do it. It sets them up for a hit piece." In response, Vote Smart has tried to shame politicians into it, and lets them leave up to 30% of answers blank.^[20]

VoteEasy is "the interactive tool that enables voters to compare their position on various issues with that of a candidate." It was introduced by Vote Smart during the 2010 election season.^[18]

Following its launch, VoteEasy was a topic of interest among several national news organizations including CBS News,^[21] The New York Times,^[22] and the Christian Science Monitor.^[23]

• On the Issues

• Ramasco, José Javier; Matter, Ulrich; Stutzer, Alois (2015). "pvsR: An Open Source Interface to Big Data on the American Political Sphere". PLOS ONE. 10 (7) e0130501. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1030501M. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0130501. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 4488489. PMID 26132154.

• Official website
• "Project+Vote+Smart", Core.ac.uk, Open access research papers
• "Package 'pvsR'" (PDF), Comprehensive R Archive Network, February 20, 2015, An R package to interact with the Project Vote Smart API for scientific research