[Reader-list] any takers?

[Vivek Narayanan]

         The Guardian Wednesday October 13, 2004

         My fellow non-Americans ...

The result of the US election will affect the lives of millions around
the world but those of us outside the 50 states have had no say in it
- until now. In a unique experiment, G2 has assembled a
democratic toolkit to enable people from Basildon to Botswana to
campaign in the presidential race. And with a little help from the
folks in Clark County, Ohio, you might help decide who takes up
residence in the White House next month. Oliver Burkeman
explains how

Get the name of a US voter
http://guardian.assets.digivault.co.uk/clark_county/

It's just possible that you have heard this once or twice before
recently, but the forthcoming American election, on November 2,
may be the most important in living memory. People have been
saying this about every presidential race for decades - but, as one
environmentalist put it recently in a US newspaper interview,
precisely the problem with crying wolf is that sometimes there is a
wolf. You would be forgiven, though, for feeling increasingly
helpless as you hear the "most important election" mantra repeated
daily: unless you happen to be a voter in a handful of swing states,
there's little you can do about the final result. If you're not
American, the situation is more acute. Certainly, the actions of the
US impact on our lives in overwhelming ways; British political life
may now be at least as heavily influenced by White House policy
as by the choices of UK voters. And yet, though the US Declaration
of Independence speaks of "a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind", you don't, of course, have a vote. You can't even donate
money to the campaigns: foreign contributions are outlawed. And
you're unlikely to have the chance to do any campaigning on the
ground. All you can do is wait and watch: you're powerless.

Or are you? At G2, that sounded like fighting talk. Where others
might see delusions of grandeur, we saw an opportunity for public
service - and so, on the following pages, we have assembled a
handy set of tools that non-Americans can use to have a real
chance of influencing the outcome of the vote. We've identified
ways to give money to help your preferred candidate, even though
direct campaign contributions from foreigners aren't allowed. There
are ideas for making your voice heard in the influential local media
outlets where it could really count. And at the core of it is a unique
scheme to match individual Guardian readers to individual
American voters, giving you the opportunity to write a personal
letter, citizen to citizen, explaining why this election matters to you,
and which issues you think ought to matter to the US electorate. It
may even be a chance to persuade somebody to use their vote at
all.

To maximise the likelihood of your efforts making a difference,
we've zeroed in on one of the places where this year's election truly
will be decided: Clark County, Ohio, which is balanced on a razor's
edge between Republicans and Democrats. In the 2000 election, Al
Gore won Clark County by 1% - equivalent to 324 votes - but
George Bush won the state as a whole by just four percentage
points. This time round, Ohio is one of the most crucial swing
states: Kerry and Bush have been campaigning there tire lessly -
they've visited Clark County itself - and the most recent Ohio poll
shows, once again, a 1% difference between the two of them. The
voters we will target in our letter-writing initiative are all Clark
County residents, and they are all registered independents, which
somewhat increases the chances of their being persuadable.

Several of the ideas described here can easily be applied across
the US too, though, and we have provided further resources on our
website for this purpose. While there's no point being coy about
Britain's preferences in this election (never mind those of Guardain
readers) - a poll last month put backing for Kerry at 47%, against
16% for Bush - we have included information for supporters of both
main candidates.

It's worth considering at the outset how counterproductive this
might all be, especially if approached undiplomatically. Anybody
might be justifiably angered by the idea of a foreigner trying to
interfere in their democratic process. But this year the issue is more
charged than ever: the Bush/Cheney campaign has made a point
of portraying Kerry as overly concerned about what other nations
think, and the Democrat's ambiguous debate point about American
foreign policy decisions needing to pass a "global test" has become
one of the president's key lines of attack. "People don't necessarily
want to hear what people from other countries have to say," says
Rachelle Valladares, the London-based chair of Democrats
Abroad. "If you contact someone you know personally in the States,
and urge them to vote, it would probably carry twice the weight."
Michael Dorf, a Columbia university law professor who has studied
foreign influences on US elections, points out that it would not be to
either candidate's advantage "to be seen as the candidate of the
foreigners. Part of it's just xenophobia, but there is also a sense
that, you know, this is our election: you vote for your parliament and
prime minister, we vote for our president and Congress."

On the other hand, being from Britain ought to give you a certain
leverage: in stump speeches and debates, Bush has repeatedly
praised Tony Blair's cooperation over Iraq, making America's long-
treasured alliance with the UK key to the president's defence of his
foreign policy. Kerry, too, knows that he's speaking to a resilient
strand of opinion when he emphasises the need for strong
international alliances: a better coalition in Iraq, he constantly
reiterates, might have saved US lives. (One recent poll suggested
that 43% of Americans think that declining world respect for their
nation is a "major problem".) As a British citizen, you can certainly
wield some influence, but you could seriously alienate people too.

              Write to a voter

The most powerful transatlantic connection is a personal one, so
we have designed a system to match individual Guardian readers
with individual voters in Clark County, in the crucial swing state of
Ohio. To join in, visit www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty and enter
your email address. You'll receive, by email, the name and postal
address of a Clark County voter. We have included only those
voters who chose to list themselves as unaffiliated, instead of as
Republican or Democrat: that is no guarantee that they are
persuadable, of course, but it does increase the chances. The data
on which our system is based is publicly available, but we have
designed it to give out each address only once, so there is no
danger of recipients getting deluged.

In formulating your letter, you will need to introduce yourself: no
individual Clark County voter will have any reason to be expecting
your communication. And in choosing your arguments, keep in
mind the real risk of alienating your reader by coming across as
interfering or offensive. You might want to handwrite your letter, for
additional impact, and we strongly recommend including your own
name and address - it lends far more credibility to your views, and
you might get a reply.

Finally, post your letter soon. Letters sent by regular airmail from
the UK to the US usually take five days to reach their recipient, and
there is little time to waste. Postage costs 43p for a postcard, 47p
for a letter weighing 10g or less, and 68p for a letter weighing up to
20g. You don't have to visit a post office, but Royal Mail
recommends writing "Par Avion - By Airmail" on the front of the
envelope, and your return address on the back.

              Give money

American law forbids foreigners from giving money to affect the
outcome of a federal election - except that, on closer inspection, it
doesn't. You're banned from donating to the campaigns
themselves, or to many of the independent campaigning groups
that fight explicitly on behalf of one candidate. So you need to
identify officially non-partisan groups whose activities, none the
less, have the practical effect of helping one candidate over the
other. "Perhaps the most important way foreigners could help John
Kerry would be to help out those organisations which have, as part
of their mission, fostering African-American voter turnout," says
Nathaniel Persily, a Pennsylvania university expert on election law.
"It's quite clear that if there was 100% African-American turnout in
Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, John Kerry would win this election
running away." The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People is the most obvious choice here - an influential,
well-organised, non-partisan body whose get-out-the-vote activities
are extremely likely to end up helping the Democrats.

"On the Republican side, it would be the Christian conservatives,"
Persily adds. "[Bush adviser] Karl Rove has tried to register four
million additional Christian evangelicals, and if they all turn out, then
Bush wins." The leading option here would be the Christian
Coalition, which describes itself as "America's leading grassroots
organisation defending our Godly heritage". As for more overtly
partisan organisations, we don't recommend trying to donate - but
it's worth pointing out that much of the law banning foreign
contributions has never been tested in court and, argues Michael
Dorf at Columbia, may even be unconstitutional on grounds of free
speech. "If a group calling itself Europeans for Truth wants to run
ads giving their view of the truth," Dorf says, "it's hard to draw a
principled distinction between that and a British newspaper
available at a US newsstand that has an editorial calling Bush and
Blair liars."

Visit the NAACP website: http://www.naacp.org
Give to the NAACP: https://www.naacp.org/contribute.php or fax a
credit-card donation to 001 410 580 5623.
Give to the NAACP in Ohio:
Send a money order marked "donation" to NAACP, 233 South High
Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215 USA. Give to the Christian Coalition:
www.cc.org or phone 001 202 479 6900.
Give to the Christian Coalition in Ohio: www.ccohio.org or phone
001 330 8871922, or send a money order to Christian Coalition of
Ohio, PO Box 852, Westfield Center, Ohio 44251, USA. For
resources on giving money in other swing states, visit
www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty.

            Make your voice heard

If you want to broadcast your views to a wider audience, focus on
the media outlets swing-state residents are reading and hearing.
Take care: deluging the same organisation with numerous near-
identical messages rarely impresses (we speak from experience),
and some activists have run into controversy recently by
disseminating "astroturf" - letters purporting to be personal but
emanating, in reality, from party headquarters. Springfielders read
the Springfield News Sun (www.springfieldnewssun.com;) and the
Columbus Dispatch (www.dispatch.com), based in the nearby state
capital, is another influential outlet.

If you're feeling brave, though, you might want to explore the highly
influential talk-radio airwaves. On the right, the overarchingly
dominant figure is Rush Limbaugh, heard on hundreds of stations
nationwide, including 19 in Ohio, some of which can be heard in
Clark County. This is a strictly at-your-own-risk proposition, but if
you want to join the debate, listen to the show live on the web at
www.rushlimbaugh.com, between 5pm and 8pm UK time every
weekday, and call in on 001 800 282 2882. Among yesterday's
topics: why John Kerry doesn't understand the significance of 9/11;
why John Kerry would be dangerous for America; how John Kerry
politicised the death of Christopher Reeve.

Air America, the upstart liberal radio counterweight, is still in its
infancy, but it can be picked up in parts of Ohio and other
battleground states. Listen to the flagship show presented by the
leftwing humourist Al Franken at www.airamericaradio.com, also
between 5pm and 8pm on weekdays, then call in on 001 866 303
2270 (neither call will be free from the UK). Franken's focus
yesterday was the "absolutely shameless" behaviour of the
conservative media in America.

You can target your message on other key states by visiting a
website such as www.electoral-vote.com, which updates regularly
with the latest local polls, so that you can identify where the race is
currently closest. Select your state, then call up a list of relevant
media contacts - or even send them emails directly - via the
impressively comprehensive Capitol Advantage site at
http://ssl.capwiz.com/congressorg/dbq/media/.

           Win the chance to watch the campaign on the ground

We are offering the four people who write the most persuasive
letters to Clark County voters the chance to travel there and watch
the campaign in person. At the end of October, the winners will
accompany a group of Guardian journalists to Ohio to meet voters
and observe the closing days of the race. For a chance to take part,
you should email a copy of your letter to
clark.county at guardian.co.uk, or send a copy to Clark County
competition, G2, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London
EC1R 3ER. Letters should arrive no later than October 20.

· For more details on how you can get involved and latest news
from the US campaign trail, go to guardian.co.uk/uselections2004.
For terms and conditions of the Clark County competition, see
www.guardian.co.uk/clarkcounty.

         The Guardian Wednesday October 13, 2004

         Dear Clark County voter, Give us back the America
         we loved. Yours sincerely, John Le Carré

         Three prominent Britons hit the campaign trail

         John Le Carré

Maybe there's one good reason - just one - for re-electing George
W Bush, and that's to force him to live with the consequences of his
appalling actions, and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the
job on a Democrat who will then get blamed for his predecessor's
follies.

Probably no American president in all history has been so
universally hated abroad as George W Bush: for his bullying
unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless
indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his
contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for
misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal
war - and now anarchy - upon a country that like too many others
around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship, but
had no hand in 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, and no
record of terrorism except as an ally of the US in a dirty war against
Iran.

Is your president a great war leader because he allowed himself to
be manipulated by a handful of deluded ideologues? Is Tony Blair a
great war leader because he committed Britain's troops, foreign
policy and domestic security to the same hare-brained adventure?

You are voting in November. We will vote next year. Yet the
outcome in both countries will in large part depend on the same
question: how long can the lies last now that the truth has finally
been told? The Iraq war was planned long before 9/11. Osama
provided the excuse. Iraq paid the price. American kids paid the
price. British kids paid the price. Our politicians lied to us.

While Bush was waging his father's war at your expense, he was
also ruining your country. He made your rich richer and your poor
and unemployed more numerous. He robbed your war veterans of
their due and reduced your children's access to education. And he
deprived more Americans than ever before of healthcare. Now he's
busy cooking the books, burying deficits and calling in contingency
funds to fight a war that his advisers promised him he could light
and put out like a candle.

Meanwhile, your Patriot Act has swept aside constitutional and civil
liberties which took brave Americans 200 years to secure, and
were once the envy of a world that now looks on in horror, not just
at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but at what you are doing to
yourselves.

But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved.
Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting
for you. And here in Britain, for as long as we have Tony Blair
singing the same lies as George Bush, your nightmares will be
ours.

© David Cornwell 2004
· John Le Carré is a novelist.

               Antonia Fraser

O duty

Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie ... ?

Why art thou so different from Venus?

And why do thou and I have so few interests in common between
us?

These sentiments on the subject of duty, so brilliantly expressed by
Ogden Nash, may well be yours, dear Unknown, when I, a national
of another country, urge you to do your duty and vote in your
coming presidential election. In fact, of course, we have all too
many interests in common. When you vote - and please do vote by
the way, even if you disagree with everything I am about to say -
that vote will have as much effect on my future and the much
longer future of my children and grandchildren, as it will on your
own. For this is a crucial election, the most crucial, I believe, of my
lifetime (and I first voted in 1955!).

First of all, if you back Kerry, you will be voting against a savage
militaristic foreign policy of pre-emptive killing which has stained the
great name of the US so hideously in recent times. A policy that
Bush and his gang are set to continue - if they get the opportunity. I
say "the great name" of the US because I believe that to be
profoundly true. Although resolutely against the Iraq war, I remain
equally resolutely philamerican, almost every movement towards
liberty in the past having its roots or its refuge in the US.

As a wartime child, I am well aware of the benevolence of the
American soldiers who came to our aid, the ones that filled the
foreign graveyards where they lay, fallen because they had joined
our war. Brought up in Oxford, I regarded these men as gods,
generous gods. I shall never forget Hank, a composite of the very
young American soldiers who regularly got my brother Thomas and
me into the Ritz cinema to see movies such as Saboteur. In fact,
Hank, in retrospect, looked rather like the Great Tom, my cinematic
hero in Saving Private Ryan (so maybe Tom is Hank's boy; I like to
think so). From the image of Hank to that of Abu Ghraib ...

Then there is the question of women's rights, and the possible
repeal of legislation that has for a generation made all women
equal before the law, not just the rich. Once again, this history of
women's rights in America is long, strong and wonderful. As long
ago as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America from France,
discovered "the singular address and happy boldness" of its
women, featured in Democracy in America. If you vote for Kerry,
you will help to avert a move backwards towards women's
suffering.

President Bush declared on Friday that, "History will decide". Dear
Unknown, please be part of that history and restore your country to
its greatness, both foreign and domestic.

· Antonia Fraser is a biographer and historian.

              Richard Dawkins

Dear Americans,

Don't be so ashamed of your president: the majority of you didn't
vote for him. If Bush is finally elected properly, that will be the time
for Americans travelling abroad to simulate a Canadian accent.
Please don't let it come to that. Vote against Bin Laden's dream
candidate. Vote to send Bush packing.

Before 9/11 gave him his big break - the neo-cons' Pearl Harbor -
Bush was written off as an amiable idiot, certain to serve only one
term. An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and
vindictive; and the thuggish ideologues who surround him are
dangerous. 9/11 gave America a free gift of goodwill, and it poured
in from all around the world. Bush took it as a free gift to the
warmongers of his party, a licence to attack an irrelevant country
which, however nasty its dictator, had no connection with 9/11. The
consequence is that all the worldwide goodwill has vanished.
Bush's America is on the way to becoming a pariah state. And
Bush's Iraq has become a beacon for terrorists.

In the service of his long-planned war (with its catastrophically
unplanned aftermath), Bush not only lied about Iraq being the
"enemy" who had attacked the twin towers. With the connivance of
the toadying Tony Blair and the spineless Colin Powell, he lied to
Congress and the world about weapons of mass destruction. He is
now brazenly lying to the American electorate about how "well"
things are going under the puppet government. By comparison with
this cynical mendacity, the worst that can be said about John Kerry
is that he sometimes changes his mind. Well, wouldn't you change
your mind if you discovered that the major premise on which you
had been persuaded to vote for war was a big fat lie?

Now that all other justifications for the war are known to be lies, the
warmongers are thrown back on one, endlessly repeated: the world
is a better place without Saddam. No doubt it is. But that's the Tony
Martin school of foreign policy [Martin was a householder who shot
dead a burglar who had broken into his house in 1999]. It's not how
civilised countries, who follow the rule of law, behave. The world
would be a better place without George Bush, but that doesn't
justify an assassination attempt. The proper way to get rid of that
smirking gunslinger is to vote him out.

As the bumper stickers put it, "Re-defeat Bush". But, this time, do it
so overwhelmingly that neither his brother's friends in Florida nor
his father's friends on the Supreme Court will be able to rig the
count. Decent Americans - there are absolutely more intelligent,
educated, civilised, cultivated, compassionate people in America
than in any other country in the western world - please show your
electoral muscle this time around. We in the rest of the world, who
sadly cannot vote in the one election that really affects our future,
are depending on you. Please don't let us down.

· Richard Dawkins is professor of the public understanding of
science at Oxford University. More letters to Clark County will be
appearing in G2 over the next fortnight.

13.10.2004: A brief guide to Clark County
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1326097,00.html
13.10.2004: Dear Clark County voter: three prominent Britons
reach out
13.10.2004: How to contact the US media
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1325803,00.html

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-- 
Vivek Narayanan
Senior Content Editor (English)
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054.

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