Tuesday night five people from the MoveOn organization were making phone calls to get voters to go out and vote.

Three out of the five were international students.

"I wondered, 'Can we make these calls?' " said Bernhard Lucke (graduate-environmental sciences), who is from Germany. "We're foreigners. I wondered how so few people were interested in the election."

A lot of international students were watching the election process from a distance, and some expressed their views on the results of the election.

"I felt helpless the whole day [Tuesday]," said Imke Brust (graduate-German), who is from Germany.

Even though he can't vote, Erkan Erdem (graduate-economics), who is from Turkey, said he was hoping Sen. John Kerry would have won the election.

"I think the Democrats are going to have to go back and look at what they did wrong," he said.

"Most of my international friends are Kerry supporters. It's not surprising because a lot of the international students care about the foreign policies and people here care about the domestic issues."

Some international students expressed their concern for the little attention the international community was given when voting for this election.

"I like the life here but I wonder how little interest people have with what's going on with the rest of the world," Lucke said. "I wonder if people are aware what it means to have a war in another country."

Robrecht van der Wel (graduate-psychology), who is from the Netherlands, said he was surprised with the result of this election.

"I used to argue to people that America is a system," van der Wel said. "The people who live in America can hold different opinions concerning the war in Iraq, that [the war] had more to do with the administration than the people. This election illustrates that's not true."

The weight given to issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion was also surprising for some international students.

"I'm surprised, I guess, because coming from the Netherlands, which is considered a liberal country, that issues like gay marriage are given more importance by voters than issues like the war on Iraq, " van der Wel said.

Brust said she did not feel the American people considered all the issues involved in this election.

"I'm embarrassed that the people in the United States didn't make a smarter decision because I think that they didn't realize they were making a decision of international consequence," she said.

A Web site, www.globalvote2004.org, was set up to allow non-Americans to vote for an election that affected the world.

The site has recorded more than 113,552 votes from 191 countries. Sen. John Kerry was declared the winner on the Web site, getting 71.1 percent of the votes, while President George W. Bush received 9 percent.

Van der Wel said the results of the election illustrate there is little concern for the international community.

"I'm unhappy because Bush has demonstrated that he doesn't care for the international community, both by his behavior and during the debates," van der Wel said.

"He doesn't care much to be part of the international community within America, and the majority of Americans apparently don't care very much about the rest of the world. That's not a good thing if you're here as an international student."

Not a lot of Americans look outside of their country to acknowledge the international community, Lucke said.

"It's a nice life here but [Americans] seem to live in a kind of not real world," Lucke said. "It's like a bubble, which is nice, beautiful and secure, but it's not the real world."

Brust said she was always split between pursuing a career in the United States or Europe, and now she is looking into pursuing a career in Europe.

"There have been situations where I questioned if I could still voice my true opinion," she said.

She said that so far a lot of the anti-American sentiment was focused on Bush, but by re-electing him, the sentiment will be shifted to Americans.

"I hope that at least [Bush] will make smarter decisions in this term and listen to the people who elected him," she said.