Over the last few weeks it has often seemed like the only thing that could get the financial crisis off of the front pages is the US elections (that and the Madona-Ritchie divorce of course). It’s hardly surprising that the process of choosing the ‘leader of the free world’ and, arguably, the most powerful man on the planet has generated such interest, but with the events of the last 8 years, this year it seems like just about everyone has an opinion.

With this in mind 3 guys from Iceland decided to find out who would win the US election if the whole world were allowed to vote and the result is If The World Could Vote. Being internet savvy guys they’ve also set up a Facebook group which currently has over 5,000 members. The founders of the site hope that they can get more international votes than were cast by US citizens in the 2004 presidential election. As it says on the site:

In the US presidential election in 2004 122,267,553 people voted. 6,500,000,000 people did not. Our mission is to get more people to vote than voted in the last election. Mission impossible, we know, but still, wouldn’t it be great to see what the whole world thinks?

At the moment, with just a few weeks left till the ballots are cast, they’ve still got someway to go. As I wrote this the number of votes cast on the site was 257,714. However, whilst that’s someway off of their target it’s still a lot more than were canvassed by a group of international newspapers and the results are interesting nonetheless.  Current polls in the US have Barack Obama on just under 50% with John McCain nudging 43%. if the rest of the world (or those who have taken the time to vote on the site) were asked their opinion then Obama would be heading for nearly a 90% landslide.

There are obviously a lot of problems with a poll of this sort (whilst the system stops votes being cast from more than one computer it doesn’t take account of those with access to more than one machine) but it does beg one question: what exactly has Obama done to offend Burkino Faso & Macedonia?

Ballot boxes image by Keith Bacongco on Flickr

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