"I'm keeping my fingers and toes crossed"

US election special: Maud Newton posts an interview with Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, in which she talks about voting early--for Obama--in Miami:

As a naturalized citizen, born in Haiti, where elections are often monitored and contested and their results sometimes outright overturned by the United States government, via regime change, I am still puzzled that we don’t have smoother and more transparent elections here in the United States.

For people around the world, who are always told by the U.S. how to prepare for and hold their elections, the fact that the Bush/Gore election of 2000 (and to a certain extent the Kerry/Gore election of 2004) was such a mess was really troubling. I hope this year we have a transparent and clear election with uncontestable results, because how can we tell the Iraqis and others how to democratically choose their leaders when we still seem to have so much trouble with it ourselves?

Meanwhile, also in Miami, the election reminds Geoffrey Philp of an important civil rights leader. And up in Toronto, pro-Obama Pamela Mordecai posts an exchange of emails with a friend in the US who has doubts about voting for the senator from Illinois.

Finally: it seems every newspaper and magazine in the world has endorsed one candidate or another in tomorrow's presidential election, with Obama the overwhelmingly popular choice. Your Antilles blogger, like most of the world's population, can't vote, but feels he has a lot at stake in tomorrow's events. If the CRB were to endorse a candidate, who would it be? The smart, eloquent, cool, confident one who looks like he could be from the Caribbean, of course--that one.