OK In-Depth; Project Vote-Smart Part 1

If you're still undecided about how to cast your votes in the November 2nd General Election, Project Votesmart may be able to help you make up your mind. The group has recently distributed a survey to all Oklahoma candidates for federal and state-wide offices, gauging their stances on a variety of issues. I spoke recently with Adelaide Elm, Project Votesmart's National Board Chair and Senior Advisor. Project Votesmart is simply a national research organization, absolutely non-partisan. We track candidates at the presidential congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative levels all around the country, and together they're voting records in their campaign contributions of their grades by special interest groups, their issue positions, contact information backgrounds, previous experience, and all the kind of information that citizens really need to get in order to be able to choose wisely in the voting booth, but information that's not readily available to people.

So we make it available on a website and a toll-free voter's research hotline as well that's staffed by college interns and volunteers. The key component of this system is the National Political Awareness Test, which is a study that we conduct every election year with every candidate running for President Congress, Governor, and State Legislature. We simply measure their willingness to provide voters with some sense of how they're going to do the job, if they get hired in November in the elections. We do a lot of research so that we can present the candidates with a very broad, very balanced and fair-minded set of questions on issues such as abortion policy, education, the environment, gun legislation, health care, welfare, foreign policy, if they're running for Congress. And we present that list of issue areas that's been reviewed by political scientists, by political journalists, by every member of our founding board, which means Republicans like John McCain, Democrats like Michael Dukakis have all signed off on the set of questions

that we present to the candidates. And we ask them to, more or less, prove it. You say, yes, you're willing to provide some information about your issue in clinicians, then why don't you answer a few of these questions. So we give them six weeks to answer. We make a minimum of four to six contacts with each campaign, and they're also contacted by major leaders for their own party, by political journalists, by project vote smart members and staff. And in the end, candidates have every opportunity to step up to the plate and provide the voters with some help. So you see all this information you compile as being useful and helpful to Oklahoma voters in making up their minds during the election? It's extremely important that people have access to a source of information on candidates that they can trust, that they know doesn't have a hidden agenda or a slander a bias. And so I think it's just as important as anything else in our political process right now that people not just register, not just get out and vote, but actually go to the polls

with some confidence that they know who those people are on the ballot, where they stand on the issues that are important to that citizen, and this is one good way to figure that out is to urge your candidates to answer these questions and make them available. Adelaide Elm is the National Board Chair and Senior Advisor to Project Vote Smart. The results of Oklahoma candidates' responses to the group's National Political Awareness Test have just been posted on the group's website at vote-smart.org. We'll review the results this afternoon. This is KGOU NewsDirector, Scott Gurren.