The Global Vote is already open for the world to vote on the UK EU Referendum on 23 June, followed closely by the Icelandic Presidential Election on 25 June. There will then be regular opportunities to vote in other elections and referenda, including the biggest vote in the world this year: the US Presidential Election on 8 November. People can vote from today here: http://goodcountry.org/global-vote.
The Global Vote has been created by Simon Anholt, an independent policy advisor who has worked with the Heads of State and Heads of Government of more than fifty countries. He is the visionary behind the Good Country, a growing global movement committed to changing how leaders run their countries, for the good of all humanity, launched in 2014 in his TEDTalk. The second edition of the Good Country Index, the worlds first study of how much each country contributes to the rest of humanity and to the planet, was launched by Anholt in June 2016.
Anholt comments: We should all care who runs other peoples countries, not just our own. To make the world work, we need a world of good leaders: leaders who consider the needs of every man, woman, child and animal on the planet. The Global Vote is here to empower us, the rest of the world, to achieve this aim by reminding each candidate in each national election that were here, we care, and were watching. The tipping-point will come when we have more people outside a given country voting on its new leaders than there are citizens voting inside the country. Every time that happens, I believe that the world will truly have changed.
With the help of our Global Voters in two hundred countries, we can build a world of good leaders, one country at a time. But we need many millions of people participating in the Global Vote if we are to change the world.
According to Anholt, the long-term goal of the Good Country movement is to encourage a new generation of world leaders with minds that telescope, not minds that microscope. We need a change in the culture of governance worldwide if nations are to learn to collaborate and co-operate a lot more, and compete a little less, and so address the huge, shared, globalised challenges that humanity faces in the modern age.