Imagine if you could vote in other countries’ elections. Or, to be precise, to vote on other countries’ elections: of course we don’t have the power directly to elect anyone or remove them from office – but power comes in many forms these days, and the influence of an international electorate could be surprisingly strong.
That’s why I’m offering people the chance to do just that. Every month or so, I will be picking an election somewhere in the world, or occasionally a referendum: we’re choosing mainly presidential elections for the time being because they’re simple to explain. Then we feature that election on our website, Global Vote, with a snapshot of each candidate giving very succinct information about who they are and what they appear to stand for. Each candidate is also invited to answer two standard questions:
1. If you are elected, what will you do for the rest of us, around the world?
2. What is your vision for your country’s role in the world?
In the absence of answers to these two questions, we will do our best to summarise the candidate’s views on these topics, as faithfully and neutrally as we can, from their published statements and interviews. We encourage our voters strongly to find out as much as they can about each candidate, and we provide links to start this process.
Then our participants vote on their chosen candidate, and we release the results, usually the day before the electorate goes to the polls.
For each election, there’s a magic tipping-point where global voters actually outnumber the electorate: every time we reach this point, the world has – in my opinion – officially changed a little, and we are one step closer to acknowledging our essential interdependence.
Why am I doing this? Because we live in an infinitely connected world, and the choices made by the leaders of all countries, large and small, near and far, rich and poor, affect all of us sooner or later. Their energy policies affect our shared climate; their defence policies affect our collective peace; their trade policies affect our prosperity and employment prospects; their stance on migration either helps or hinders the collective effort to manage the crises of human movement that continually sweep across the world.
And because we are all affected by those policies, we must all make our views known about what sort of leaders we prefer our neighbors to choose.
Our voters are encouraged never to make their selection on the grounds that one or another candidate will do a better or worse job of running that particular country – that’s the concern of the electorate alone – but on the grounds that he or she will remember the rest of humanity and the planet when running their country.
Today, I believe, all leaders have a dual mandate. They are primarily responsible, as they always have been, for their own people and their own slice of territory: but in our hyper-connected world, they are also responsible, to some degree, for every living thing in the world, and for every square mile of the planet’s surface and the atmosphere above it. And those two mandates are by no means mutually exclusive: incorporating the international dimension can make better domestic policy, not just unhappy compromises.
It’s very tempting, in an age of constant crisis and terrifying global challenges, to retreat into selfishness, tribalism, fear and hostility towards the rest of our own species. And of course, in times like these, we are never short of politicians who win support by echoing that fear and hostility: but since our problems are global and our challenges are shared, they’re moving in the wrong direction.
We need leaders with minds that telescope, not minds that microscope: a lot more collaboration and cooperation between countries, and a little less competition, is the only way forward. This global vote aims to ensure that this critical attribute is never forgotten when we choose our leaders. Rightwing or leftwing, conservative or progressive, the politics are secondary to the main question: are you with humanity or against it?
