The Drum Major Institute, a non-partisan, progressive think tank, has launched a Google AdWords campaign that takes advantage of the search engine’s ad results to educate voters.

Here’s how it works: Do a search for your congressman and check the list of “Sponsored Links” to the right. You’ll find your congressman with a letter grade representing his/her DMI score.

Here’s a few examples:

• Berman Earns An “A”
• Herseth Earns A “C”
• Feingold Earns An “A”
• Santorum Earns An “F”

The DMI gets points for originality. This campaign alerts net users to DMI’s congressional scoring whenever anyone does a search for a member and provides a link to more details of the member’s scorecard. This makes it easy to learn about the voting record of your representative whether you were looking for it or not.

Will this campaign produce a more informed electorate? Probably not. But it does inspire one to imagine other ways to exploit new media for the public good.