RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And people around the world are voting for the next U.S. president thanks to one German news site. Jochen Wegner is the editor-in-chief of Zeit Online.
MONTAGNE: We thought it would be a cool idea just to give people the chance to vote themselves, wherever they are, knowing that this isn't kind of statistically relevant.
MONTAGNE: Meaning their global poll isn't scientific but all in good fun.
JOCHEN WEGNER: First of all, it's a game. It's a game, and we try to trick you into thinking about the U.S. election.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Well, the hope was to attract worldwide participation in this, and so the ballot is offered in different languages. More than 100,000 votes have come in so far, tens of thousands of those from Germany alone. And the count shows 30 percent of Germans favor Donald Trump.
WEGNER: If you look at the other countries, you see, for example, that - the Russian Federation or Poland or Hungary - you have really high percentages of voters favoring Trump. So for example, I think Russia has something about 70 percent for Trump at the moment.
GREENE: In this unofficial online election, there is already evidence of vote-rigging. In the first 24 hours, the site got thousands of bots voting, not real people.
MONTAGNE: Zeit Online then introduced an advanced filter to fix that. But still, the online vote isn't tamper-proof.
WEGNER: If you're a genius - if you are really into these things, it's always possible to have camouflage bot voting for whatever reason.
MONTAGNE: Zeit Online will close its online poll a couple of days before the real Election Day in America.
GREENE: As for that real Election Day and the day after, NPR and our colleagues from member stations across the country will have live coverage bringing you the latest national and local results. The election is almost here. Listen live, and follow the races important to you at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.