Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

The World Votes (Sort of)
It's generally thought that the majority of people outside the United States would prefer that John Kerry win tomorrow's presidential election. Now Globalvote, a non-partisan, London-based website not sponsored or connected to any political party, has released the outcome of its worldwide virtual voting. Kerry beats George W. Bush with a whopping 77 percent.

The website collected opinions from 113,000 from 119 countries. Bush actually won the vote in Iraq -- one of the very few countries where that was the result -- and the Middle East voted 37 percent for Bush, compared to a world average of 9.1 percent.

Of course, the Web vote is non-scientific, and it's a snapshot of Internet users -- which in some countries are a small minority of the population. So I wouldn't take this too seriously.

However, Globalvote is yet another example of how the world is getting more interconnected thanks to the Internet. The other recent example is The Guardian's controversial online effort that had its British readers sending e-mails to voters in a county in Ohio, lobbying them on how to vote.

Of course, many Americans think this trend stinks.