Covering an election from afar

On November 17th I flew to San Francisco to conduct “research” for my Masters Paper. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, I don’t belong in the Marshall Islands while I’m on a U.S. Student visa. So I had to set foot on mainland USA in order to keep my visa active.

I necessarily needed to be outside of the Marshall Islands at a crucial moment in history: the November 19th national election. This was too bad but I decided to make the best of it. I was going to interview a couple of people about the Marshallese election. Here are some sample questions I wanted to ask:

Who do you expect to become Prime Minister? (trick question to demonstrate ignorance, since the Marshall Islands has a President)

If you were an election observer, would you use a clipboard or a note pad?

Suffice to say, all I might get is an unscientific sampling of whether people prefer clipboards or note pads. In my busy schedule (I slept in a lot), I didn’t get around to the interviews.

To get an inside view of Decision 2007, see Senior Political Correspondant Alison Lemoine’s blog.

So now I’m back in the Marshalls and will not let my blog slip for 2 weeks again!

I’d like to leave you all with the youngest candidate to run for the senate: