About WorldVote 2008

Hello everyone! My name is Bryn Baker and I’m a ninth grade student at Needham High School in Needham, Massachusetts. This website is a project I inherited from my older brothers Will and Drew, who put up a WorldVote 2004 (the Presidential election between George Bush and John Kerry) website when they were in high school. I helped on my brothers' Worldvote 2004 project for many, many hours, when I was 10 years old, by sending out emails to high school history teachers all over the country, trying to get their students involved in politics by 'voting' for either John Kerry or George Bush in the November 2004 Presidential Election in the United States. Even as a ten year old girl, I felt involved in a project and a national election. It was a great experience. One of the social studies teachers I sent to in Oregon got his whole high school to vote. Another great thing that happened four years ago was that right after the Worldvote site went up, we were contacted through the "questions" email link by someone from National Public Radio who was curious about our website and congratulated all of us for our efforts.

By meeting people in other countries, and by learning about different places in both my language and social studies classes, I realized that most American students like me don't really know that much about how people in different places around the world feel about world politics or important events, like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is worse is that many young people who are old enough to vote in Presidential elections don't even bother to do so. Hopefully, young people will have a better turn-out in the 2008 election.

So, the primary goal for this website is to poll people in as many countries as possible on issues that are important, not only for our country, but for the rest of the world, as well. I am starting out with this question about the 2008 Presidential Election, because we feel that other countries may have strong opinions or preferences about what will happen politically in the United States in years to come. We have called the site WorldVote and it can be reached through either of two domain names: www.worldvote.net or www.worldvote.us

Because I was anxious to get the voting started to test out the site, we ran a preliminary worldvote offering three candidates for people to choose from: Senator John McCain, the Presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and either Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the two leading candidates of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama won over 60% of votes in that preliminary poll. I have now 'reset' the counter now that both candidates have selected their running mates. Now, visitors to Worldvote.net will have a choice between Senator John McCain (Republican Party candidate for President of the United States) or Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States.

I hope that men and women, boys and girls of all ages and from many areas of the world will find a way to go onto the internet and cast a WorldVote on this site, even if they don't have an opportunity to vote for the leaders in their own countries. We also invite those who are not yet old enough to vote (officially) to vote on this WORLDVOTE website. Just be sure to accurately indicate your birthdate, so that your vote can be counted with those of other young people your same age. Young people like me who are in middle/high school should absolutely vote, because many of us will be old enough to vote by the next Presidential election in the U.S. in 2012.

I hope that some teachers will supervise and encourage a WorldVote in their classrooms and send in the results through the email links on the website, or have students vote individually from their own computers. Those who are interested in doing this should contact me through the email links on the website and I will tell you what information we need. All of those who participate will be able to view the results of this WorldVote in November 2008, both overall results and broken down by geographic region, either country or by state within the United States only. For an idea of how the results will be presented in November, you can view the geographic presentation of results of the WorldVote 2004 from a link on the home page of this website.

We don’t have any sponsors for this site, but it has cost less than 50 dollars so far to register the names, set up the email, and buy some space on a web server for a year. But this project has turned out to be a lot more complicated than we first thought, and we have gotten lots of help to take this from just an idea to a real website.

Several people have been very important in making this a reality. First, our former neighbor Lauren Abeles helped to set up the original WorldVote website with my brothers. My dad has helped by getting my brothers and me motivated and interested in politics in the first place, and making sure we understand enough to run the website and handle vote counting by ourselves. Next, Michael Bate has helped us out a lot on both the 2004 and 2008 versions of WorldVote, particularly when it comes to technical problems that we had no idea how to handle, such as finding better ways to collect the information about the regions and countries of our voters. We also needed to find ways to limit people to just one vote each, because some of the first people who tested the site for us immediately tried to vote over and over just to see if they could. Michael also does some projects with websites himself. We hope you will look at one of his websites where he works with restoring old photographs. You can visit this website at http://home.comcast.net/~PhotoEnhance.

My brothers and I want to thank Lauren, Michael and our dad again for all the help they have given us. This web site would never have been finished if they had not assisted us in so many ways. There was a lot more to this project than we ever imagined when we first started.

And these weren’t the only people who helped. We soon realized that if we were serious about trying to get people from other countries to participate in WorldVote, it was obvious that we would have to do more than just an English language version. We decided to add French, Spanish and Chinese language web pages first, because we had studied these languages in school. But when we tried to translate from our English version, it was soon pretty clear that we didn’t really know these languages well enough to write something for people who have spoken these languages all of their lives. So our dad helped out again by asking for help from some of his friends who live or were born in other countries. All of these people are native speakers of the language that they translated. We sent them our English version to translate as closely as possible, so that all of the various foreign language versions would say the same thing. Then these various versions were loaded onto the website. Will did most of the editing work to try to make all the pages look the same.

And then we decided that we really should add other languages, too. We have stopped for the moment at ten major world languages: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Italian, and Hindi, but we might add more in the future (any volunteers out there should respond through the email links on the home page or last page after the voting). The names of just some of the people who helped are Diana Bombelli, Christian Mortgat, Sylvia Tu, Elenore Schwemmer, Claudio Stampi, and several other persons. So, thanks very much to all of these friends for sending us their translations. We hope their efforts made it easier for people in other parts of the world to participate in the WorldVote.

The most important thing that all of the visitors to this site can do is help us to spread the word to their friends to visit the site and cast their own WorldVote about their preference for the next U.S. President. We are interested in hearing from 'WorldVoters' of every age and from every country; just be sure to indicate your year of birth and country of current residence when voting. We ask visitor to this site who has friends in countries other than where they live to try to spread the world to these new countries. We hope to reach as many countries as possible and learn lots of geography in the process, as we try to figure out where all the votes are coming from.

If we get email questions in other languages, we will do our best to read and answer them. When writing in a language besides English, please write simple, short questions that can be answered with simple responses (like YES or NO) or try to write the question in English. We’ll do our best to answer every question we receive. And we appreciate any personal comments about the United States Presidential election, particularly from those living in other countries.

Thanks for visiting our website, and don’t forget to submit your WorldVote!

Bryn

P.S.

Vote Early and Vote Often.

Just kidding ! The ballot form will identify and eliminate duplicate votes. If you try to vote twice from the same computer, you will get a message that you have already voted.

If someone wants to allow several people to vote from one computer, such as students voting from one classroom computer, please send me an email from the link on the main page of WorldVote and we'll talk about what kind of information we will need if you want all of the votes to be counted, and various ways to do this, including telling us a date and time you want to hold your local 'election'.

Thank You for visiting WorldVote.