One of the great, shiny ideals that organizations like IPDI espouse is the belief that the Internet is a tremendous tool for political and civic engagement. And my-oh-my has there emerged a delightful abundance of sites that attempt to inform and enable voters.

Here’s a shortlist of sites I am cruising this week:

The National Presidential Caucus (NPC) is an organization trying to engage voters in a day of discussion and deliberation preceding the 2008 presidential primaries. As Myles Weisleder put it when I spoke with him yesterday, “If there’s a national primary, then should be a national caucus to discuss issues before the vote. People deserve more.” IPDI pledges to hold its own caucus in December.

Connect2Elect asks each user questions about his or her political beliefs, and then matches the users up with the presidential candidates who most closely match. What matches Connect2Elect different (and a bit more fun) than other sites is its lack on multiple choice questions. Instead, users drag and drop values into different columns, a practice that is rather addicting.

RangeVoting.org uses an algorithm to eliminate some of the ills of redistricting: “huge amount of gerrymandering, artificially manipulated spoiled ballots, and ludicrous ballot access restrictions.”

John Edwards has visited more states in one day than any of the other presidential candidates this summer, according to Chad Matlin and E.J. Kalafarski, the creators of MapTheCandidates.com.

On July 16, Edwards crammed four different states into one day, and MapTheCandidates has been tracking them all, along with all the stops of the rest of the presidential candidates.

The site was the brainchild of Matlin, who came up with the idea while playing around with Google Maps one evening. Matlin enlisted Kalafarski to create the site, which tracks presidential campaign stops and links each stop to a YouTube video or press clip covering the event.

Matlin and Kalafarski designed the site for the “casual voter” who wants to follow the candidates. When we spoke with Matlin and Kalafarsky earlier today, both stressed the fact that see their site as an attempt to do media awareness outreach — showing voters exactly where the candidates are spending their time and what they are saying.

That’s why they try to keep the videos they use strictly nonpartisan. “People have asked us why we don’t have the 1984/Vote Different video on our site,” said Matlin, “It’s not there because we’ve taken pains to stay nonpartisan, and it’s not tied to a campaign stop.”

Kalafarsky says the site is evolving, and in the near future it will use a better clustering tool to show the “highest intensity spots” — the locations where the candidates spend the most time. The team is also building pages for each of the candidates, which will include a map with just one candidate’s campaign stops, along with a list of his or her campaign issues.

By the way, the site’s busiest traveling campaign — the Edwards campaign — is one of the few presidential campaigns to not add MapTheCandidates to its schedule list, so the MapTheCandidates team has to dig through media coverage of the Edwards campaign to compile its maps.

We spent part of the morning yesterday playing with a Google Map/journal of Senator Ben Nelson’s four-day trip to Iraq last month.

The mashup allows visitors to read about each stop, see pictures, and (in some cases) watch video.