'Even the church we go to has, for the last few months, been announcing from the pulpit that it is a sin not to vote.'

Helen Angove on some of the post election myths currently doing the rounds in the US.

You may remember the scene at the beginning of The Terminator film, where the Terminator (as played, of course, by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is going through the phone book, picking out particular people, and systematically going to their houses and shooting them.

A couple of weeks before the election, my friend received a phone call. She was disconcerted to hear the familiar, stolid Austrian tones of the State Governor on the other end of the line, exhorting her to vote in line with him on a number of issues. It was, of course, just a pre-recorded canvassing call. But she said that, for the rest of the day, she was half expecting Arnie to turn up on her doorstep toting a sub-machine gun - particularly as she is a vociferous Democrat.

Myths

Paranoia? Of course. But I have never come across so much paranoia connected to an election - paranoia on a scale I’d more reasonably expect from a third world country with a military dictatorship. I have also never come across such an impressive collection of urban myths.

One of the most pervasive myths was about voter de-registration. It is a very easy thing in the US to register a change of address on the electoral register - and no form of identification is needed. There were numerous stories about people going to the polls and discovering that they had been de-registered and were not eligible to vote. The theory was that Bush supporters had been systematically filing address changes for people who (by age and district) might be expected to vote Kerry.

There were stories about electronic voting booths in Florida that automatically registered a vote for Bush even if you voted otherwise, and voting machines in Pennsylvania which allegedly already had votes registered on them when the polls opened on polling day.

Another urban myth was about a girl who made some flippant anti-Bush comments in her blog (on-line diary) intended as throw-away comments among friends. She was horrified, as a result, to receive a visit from the FBI late one evening after someone informed on her as a possible threat to the President’s life. Frightening for all of us who occasionally indulge in on-line hyperbole.

I have no idea to what extent any of these stories are true. But the fact that they existed in such numbers pointed, I think, to a deep rooted unease in the American psyche about the integrity of this election - given the questionable result of the last one. And what I do know for fact is that in Arizona people were queuing to vote early (usually vote casting before polling day amounts to no more than a handful of people) and in some parts of the States people camped overnight in front of the polling stations in order to be sure of casting their vote on polling day. We have asked our friends about previous presidential elections, and they tell us that this degree of paranoia is hitherto unknown.

In actual fact, the American elections were monitored by international observers - the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). They did find some problems with the US system, but none of sufficient gravity to call the result into question. And though a lot of my friends have gone into deep mourning since, there doesn’t seem to be any tendency to query the result now it has been announced.

But the voting turnout this election surpassed anything known in recent years - even the church we go to has, for the last few months, been announcing from the pulpit that it is a sin not to vote. Two women in their thirties, who work in my husband’s office, voted for the first time ever in this election. If this bout of paranoia has had some effect on the numbers of people who make the effort to vote, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. I’d even go so far as to suggest that the UK could do with something of the same.

Helen Angove is an Anglican priest from the UK, who moved to California in July 2003.

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