World-Wide Vote

The British magazine, The Economist, is running a mock election using an electoral college model like ours here in the U.S. Each country gets a number of electoral college votes based on its population. Right now, the results read 8002 Obama to 12 McCain. El Salvador is the culprit in giving McCain anything. The results are updated every three hours, but I have the sense it will take some real work on the Republican side to change this thing around.

If only it counted...

Another similar site I found a while back is called IfTheWorldCouldVote.com. This one simply tallies the total votes, though the results are broken down by country. The results there are surprisingly similar to The Economist's:
Barack Obama 86.2% (64720 votes)
John McCain 13.8% (10348 votes)
Total number of votes: 75069 Countries voted from: 162

When I first saw these results, I assumed there was a heavy self-selection bias. The Economist's results may also be the result of self-selection, but their site is limited to subscribers and those who have registered. While the Economist is fairly centrist overall, I know that both liberal and conservative bloggers in the US consider it owned and operated by the other side- as they do the New York Times.

So what do these results mean? I suspect we're seeing a very real revulsion toward Bush-style internationalism: "Just do what we say, and no one gets hurt." Along with a growing recognition that McCain's ignorance and bellicosity indicates similar behavior if he was to become president. On the other hand, both of these polls show the US results in the range of 80%-20% Obama, a very poor match to the reality.