The world backs Barack Obama

As The Economist points out all democratic systems have their quirks, and America's is no exception. The electoral college is a 200-year-old institution. According to its rules, Americans do not vote directly for their presidents. Instead they cast a ballot to decide who wins their state's electoral-college votes.
Stuart Bruce put me on to this. According to The Economist the number of these votes in the electoral college is fixed by the number of people the state sends to Congress, which in turn is based on its population. All states have a minimum of three votes and there are 538 electoral-college votes up for grabs in total. The presidential candidate who secures the most electoral-college votes ends up in the White House.
Critics of the electoral-college system say it can produce a president who has lost the popular vote, as happened in 2000. They also complain that the winner-takes-all system employed by most states leads candidates to focus on a small number of "swing states" and ignore more reliably partisan ones.
There have consequently been many attempts to reform the electoral-college system - over 700 so far - though until now nobody has suggested that the entire world be included.
Now The Economist has. If we could all vote McCain would be toast and Obama will be in power come November 5. Check it out.
Interestingly the only nations in favour of McCain are Macedonia and Georgia.