What the rest of the World thinks...

Global Vote 2004 is a project that offered non-US citizens an opportunity to make a choice in the US presidential election. I consider their methods to be as valid as any of the various "polls" that have been trumpeting their results at us for months. They released their results yesterday.

About 100,000 votes were collected. Of those, 77% preferred Kerry, and only about 10% liked Bush. The remaining votes were spread among the various minority party candidates.

Not a surprise, I guess. Dubya has really made America look selfish and short-sighted in the eyes of the World.

Voting

Well, sort of hopeful. We went at 6:30 this morning to cast our votes. We live in an area that is a Republican stronghold so intense that for many offices there were no opposing candidates at all, just a single Republican on the ballot. Even if I liked the Republican, I wouldn't vote for them under those circumstances. It is really true that no choice is being offered. The candidates are selected by the closed committees of the party, and the Republican party organization is essentially running this county. Nonetheless, I am hearing a lot of people say "I am a Republican but I will not vote for Bush."

For those of you who live in urban areas, this may sound odd. Our township has only two precincts, both vote in the same place. The election judges and volunteers are your neighbors. They may not be your friends, but they know you, especially after a few elections have gone by. We don't put out lawn signs or put bumper stickers on our cars, but I'm sure most of these Republican stalwarts know that we vote against them. Nonetheless, there is never any hostility, and never a line waiting to vote. In fact, if you go mid-day you may be the only one there other than the poll workers. Sometimes the voting ends early because all the registered voters have already appeared, or so I'm told.

We use paper ballots that are counted by optical scanner. You blacken little circles, and the ballot box scans your ballot, rejecting it if you made an error such as voting for two candidates for the same office. (It does not reject ballots that seem to have no vote for an office, though, which was the issue in Florida four years ago.) After depositing my vote, and receiving my little stick-on badge that says "I voted", it occurred to me just how much that ballot box resembles a heavy duty paper shredder. This is not a happy thought and I am trying not to dwell on it.