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Mock World Vote
beaverbrother writes "As an experiment, a group of engineers from around the world created us-election.com. People over 18 from around the world can vote on the site. Its amazing the difference between U.S. viewpoint and world viewpoint. Kerry leads on the site overwhelmingly, while Bush is ahead in the U.S."
The overwhelming majority of votes are from North America, where Kerry supposedly holds a commanding lead. This is just a great example of why web-polls are not scientific.
I don't think the rest of the world has as much access to the campaigning but should be aware of more than one or two issues with Bush. The website provides links to their websites for the campaign propaganda.
I wasn't surprised Bush had so little vote from the UK, we all think he's thick as pig shit. What did surprise me was that in France and Germany, who politically were so set against the war in Iraq he has a sizable chunk of the vote - I believe 36% in France, 45% in Germany.
It's true that we don't have much access to your presidential campaign materials. More accurately, we don't see the US Presidency candidates marching up and down the counties of England (and a good thing too!).
Saying that though, we (being outside of the United States) are perfectly capable of reading about what's going on in the US. In fact, I come across a staggering amount of American news in my day -- staggering not because it's there, but because there's so much of it for a country that's so far away. By contrast, I rarely hear about what's going on in other parts of the EU (in which I live).
So, to come to my point, I agree that those of us outside the US would vote based on less issues than an informed person inside the US. However, I disagree that not paying attention to most of the campaigning has a lot to do with it. We're perfectly capable of reading manifestos and proposed policy documents which, in my case, is preferable anyway.
Slackware user since 1997.
Imagine you live far away from the U.S. Most of your news comes from the clearly biased BBC (remember the big battle they lost with Tony Blair, when it turned out there reporter misquoted the expert who wound up committing suicide) or Al Jazeera. Then you stumble on to this site.
You read the descriptions of George Bush and John Kerry. Kerry is described in glowing terms, as the Vietnam war hero who led the fight against the war, while Bush consistently supports tax cuts "despite the increasing budget deficit".
Kerry is described as being for free trade and "led the effort" for permanent normal trade relations with China, and sponsored a bill to commit $100 million to fight AIDS in Africa. While giving Kerry glowing credit for these modest proposals, the article refuses to mention the $15 billion in African AIDS assistance proposed by President Bush in his last State of the Union address. And, of course, it does not point out that Kerry is more for "fair trade" than "free trade".
How would you wind up voting then? The electorate works just like computers it follows the old GIGO rule. If you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Fortunately in the U.S. there are plenty of news media outlets to get information to counteract blatant untruths, but the rest of the world is not always so fortunate.
So whereas Europeans (rightfully!!! --Added so that someone can mod me flamebait if he wants to) like to blame US citizens for their ignorance of the rest of the world, this shows that my fellow Germans are not much better informed about US politics.