Calling All Non-Americans (Not to Be Confused with Un-Americans)

[queerbychoice]

In a recent comment on my journal, Mikie suggested some revolutionary new methods for improving the American governmental system, including the following:

Americans should not be allowed to vote in American elections. Europeans should vote for the American government in their stead, until such time as the US media has become sufficiently freed from government controls and their schools wrested from the propaganda mill that the American public can even know enough about the world they live in to have a meaningful opinion about anything. This will also require that the Americans introduce a new system of government known as democracy in place of their bizarre two-party oligarchy.

It now appears that Mikie is not the only person to come up with an idea along these lines. In fact, Loz recently pointed out that there is in fact a website now conducting The U.S. Election for the Rest of the World: an election in which only people who reside anywhere other than the United States are allowed to vote on who should become the next U.S. President. Currently, Ralph Nader holds a small lead over John Kerry, and Bush is barely even in the running at all. Unfortunately my own preferred candidate, Dennis Kucinich, is handicapped by the fact that the website owner cruelly neglected to include him on the ballot until hundreds of frustrated voters conducted a write-in campaign to get him added, but now he's on the ballot. I'd like to help give him some more votes, but of course as an American living in America I'm not allowed voting rights in this election.

Are you a non-American? Or even, like Mikie, an American currently living outside the U.S.? Go exercise your voting rights! Vote in The U.S. Election for the Rest of the World, and show us Americans how voting ought to be done.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

The point is, that if your grounds are that American media is controlled by the government, well, it would be sort of weird to have people with even -more- government-controlled media voting for the American president. Even if you restrict the group of voters to European countries, which are far more democratic than most other continents, a lot of those countries fail the "government not owning the media" test.

Then again, I despise Ralph Nader for reasons independent of the "stealing votes from democrats" phenomenon. So I guess I'm more willing to take issue with the strategy because I don't like the results. I'll admit I'd rather have Nader than Bush, but yeah. And probably when you include the billions of non-Americans who don't have Internet access, you'd get vastly different results anyway.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I'm no Nader fan either, but I'm at the point where I dislike Kerry even more than I dislike Nader. And I can't really fault the non-Americans for not voting Kucinich when they weren't given him as an option.

And I'm saying that my grounds aren't that the American media is controlled by the government. Those were Mikie's grounds for suggesting the idea (or rather, a part of Mikie's grounds for suggesting the idea - another part of Mikie's grounds was just that non-Americans haven't been successfully trained into the idea that they have to always vote for one of the two major-party candidates in order not to throw their votes away, when the huge number of Americans fearing to throw their votes away is part of the reason why third parties have so little power), but not my grounds for liking the idea. My grounds for liking the idea was just simply that I liked the results. Or rather, I liked them as well as I could like any results when they only gave Bush, Kerry, and Nader as options.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Ok, this makes more sense. I still dislike Nader more than I dislike Kerry, but that might be because I'm trying to make myself like Kerry enough to vote for him in the November election. I'd happily vote for Kucinich if he got the nomination, too, though I'm pretty sure I didn't agree with either of them terribly much when I took that "which democratic candidate should you vote for?" test. I didn't even think I agreed with them more than I agreed with Sharpton.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I really can't make myself like a guy who apparently "fell in love with the concept" (this is a quote from one of his friends) of offering the vice presidential nomination on his own ticket to pro-life Republican John McCain.

I am officially declining to decide who I will vote for this November until Election Day morning. I've done this twice before, once when I decided on Election Day morning to vote for Gray Davis in his first gubernatorial campaign instead of for the Peace & Freedom Party candidate, and once when I decided on Election Day morning to vote for Socialist presidential candidate David McReynolds against Al Gore in 2000. Both elections were painful and the lack of votes for the Peace & Freedom Party candidate against Gray Davis actually caused the Peace & Freedom Party to get thrown off the ballot for the next two elections, which was the most painful thing that's ever happened to my electoral experience. This November's going to be very painful too, unless Kerry gets a big enough lead that I can feel safe to just hate him freely.