News

America Should Allow Other Countries To Vote In The 2020 Election.

By Daniel M

March 25, 2019

The British seem to think that themselves and other countries should vote in our elections. See the article below from independent.co.uk:

I was nine years old when I first seriously pondered the result of a US presidential election. It was 2000 and my father suggested we bet on who would win the 2000 vote – George W Bush or Al Gore. In the kitchen of our apartment in the Paris suburbs, I bet a piece of gum that it would be Gore. Two months later, the Supreme Court decided otherwise, and I didn’t realise until many years later how close I had come to being right. Perhaps that’s when it originated: the idea that maybe other countries shouldn’t just be left wringing their hands every four years and waiting to see who US citizens had chosen to appoint as (to speak like a White House staffer on Scandal) the leader of the Free World. And perhaps that seed of an idea continued to gestate in 2004, when we waited to find out whether John Kerry would deprive George W Bush of a second term; then in 2008, when T-shirts bearing Barack Obama’s red and blue “Hope” poster started cropping up on the streets of the French capital; and again in 2012, when we learned the names of his Republican challengers. Then, of course, came November 2016, by which time I had moved from my native France to the US. I came home from work at approximately four the morning after the election and spent an hour or two on the phone with my mother (it was mid-morning in Paris) talking about Donald Trump’s ascent to power and what it meant for America as well as for the world. One election after the next, we have seen how much the results of the US presidential vote impact not just the 50 states, but the rest of the planet too. And if the future of foreign countries is shaped to a significant extent by what goes on on US Election Day, shouldn’t they get a say in who gets to lead the most powerful nation in the world for the next four years? In other words: shouldn’t foreign countries have a right to vote in the US presidential election? I know, I know. The idea sounds so absurd, so outrageous that it’s hard to know where to begin your rebuttal. I have floated it around, timidly, in bars and at various dinner parties over the years, and let me tell you – it’s hard to get people to agree with me. And I get it: it’s never been done. I will probably never be done. But last week, a terrorist killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The alleged gunman, who had referred to himself as a white nationalist, viewed Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity”. So, yes, I think it’s high time to acknowledge the fact that what happens in the US has immense, tangible consequences on the rest of the world, and I am tired of crossing my fingers hoping that American voters will do the right thing. I remember the Iraq war debate, and how George W Bush expressed his disappointment at my country and others for deciding not to align with US forces – while insisting that he was “not mad” we had decided to opt out of the invasion. I remember our collective bewilderment at the term “freedom fries”, and I remember lacking clarity on some of the details, on account of being 11 years old at the time. But the feeling that the US, more than any other nation, shapes our collective future has only grown clearer and stronger since.