What am I going to do this summer? This is a dilemma all too familiar for college students, and working as an unpaid intern doing political research in the middle of the Montana Rockies is the far out choice.

However, it is a choice Kyohei Yamada, of Lewiston, and I made this election year. We joined a select group of 40 college students who made the decision to intern with Project Vote Smart, a non-partisan research organization. What motivated us to give up beer and the beach during one of our last summers of freedom to intern at Project Vote Smart? Besides the obvious answers of “building my resume” or “trying to get into a good graduate or law school,” what could be more exciting than working in politics in an election year?

Little did we know that after traveling for hours and days to get to Project Vote Smart’s Great Divide Ranch research headquarters in Philipsburg, Mont., we would be following a different kind of campaign trail in one of the most important political summers in this country’s history. Instead of promoting the face of some politician, our goal would be saving the face of democracy.

Yamada is not the typical American college student. He was born in Komatsu, Japan, but came to America in August 2003 to attend Bates College. He is a baseball player at the college and is majoring in political science with a concentration in the American political process and minoring in economics.

While at Project Vote Smart, Yamada worked with the national issue organizations. “I checked their mission statements and after that, worked on state issue organizations,” said Yamada. “More recently, I worked on finding new organizations and interest groups on the state level.”

It is amazing to me that someone who is not able to legally vote in the upcoming election would sacrifice 10 weeks of his summer vacation to help ensure Americans who can vote will have the information to make an informed decision.

“It is fascinating to learn that a number of interest groups exist both at national at state level. They seem to have significant influences on politics in this country. Also, through special interest groups I have learned which issues are important to the people in this country,” said Yamada.

We live in the information age but trustworthy, factual, relevant information seems to be the one thing missing from our political landscape. Today, the democracy our founders imagined more closely resembles the Leaning Tower of Pisa than the strong, stable entity they envisioned.

Project Vote Smart – PVS to the thousands of staff, interns and volunteers who have passed before us through these doors since the project was inaugurated in 1992 – has vowed to change that.

The solution? A one-stop shopping center of facts on more than 40,000 candidates and elected officials – facts that are accurate, easy to get and relevant. Not hype or rhetoric, but solid information like voting records, issue positions and campaign contributions, in a spin-free zone that Project Vote Smart calls the Voter’s Self-Defense System.

The first impression of PVS might be skepticism. Running down the list of founding board members’ names you see senators George McGovern, John McCain and Bill Frist; representatives Geraldine Ferraro and Newt Gingrich; and Gov. Michael Dukakis, to name a few. We wondered what these people could possibly agree about.

Even more perplexing is why an organization devoted to politics is located in such a remote region of the country so far from the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

The first sign we encountered said, “Check your politics at the door.” The second said, “Quiet. Democracy is being reborn.”

We soon found that not only do these signs epitomize the protections and idealism built into the Project’s Voters Self-Defense System, they represent the very thing board members do agree on.

PVS founders, among them former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, recognized the void in American civic culture and had a vision for an organization that was dedicated to upholding one of the most important ideals of democracy: an informed electorate.

They started the Project in 1992 as a non-partisan entity with a catch: to join the board you must sign on with a partner who holds the opposite ideals and agenda from yourself.

PVS is funded entirely by individual contributions from its 46,000 members and from philanthropic grants from the Ford, Carnegie, Hearst and Revson foundations, which ensures that corporate, union, special interest or government organizations will not have any influence on the information in the Project’s databases.

As a nonprofit, non-partisan organization, PVS compiles databases that deal out only the facts on every candidate for president, Congress, governor and state legislatures – Republicans, Democratic, third parties and independents. All of the information is stored in an online library at www.vote-smart.org, and can also be accessed by the public by calling the toll-free voter’s research hot line number: 888-VOTE SMART.

Gathering millions of facts on 40,000 politicians is tedious, monotonous, and often mind-numbing. And that’s why we did this work in one of the most spectacularly beautiful places on Earth. After a 10-hour day, we could go fishing or swimming in Moose Lake, horseback riding through the Pintler Mountains or just lie back in a hammock and soak up the wilderness peace and quiet. The retreat-like setting was both an initial attraction (almost as good as beer and the beach), and also a way to reward us for the long hours and commitment.

High up in the mountains of Montana our group of freedom fighters at PVS might not be as tan or as rich as our counterparts who stayed at home for the summer, but we all had an experience we will never forget.

And come Nov. 2, those of us who interned for PVS will have one more thing: an appreciation for the fact that thousands of Americans were able to cast their vote based on hard facts, courtesy of PVS and our hard work, and not based on the fluff they were fed from the candidates.

Kimberly S. Maloomian is a national nedia intern with Project Vote Smart. She is a senior at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass.