Can chocolate-lovers call the U.S. Presidential Election? A chocolate maker in the south of France seems to think so.
Luxury sweet maker 'Paris Chocolat' has unveiled a novel way to test the appetites of political junkies ahead of November's poll.
Their 'Presidential Election 2012' chocolate box contains dark chocolate medallions imprinted with faces of candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, enticing chocoholics to choose their preferred man for the job.
The company has designed a poll with a difference to accompany the boxes -- each time a customer buys a box, they can vote for their favorite candidate online.
"In fact, the box is 100 percent chocolate. The photos are in the likeness of the presidential candidates, made entirely of chocolate, and you can go to the website parischocolat.com to vote for your preferred candidate," Eric Monterrat, owner of 'Paris Chocolat' said.
Earlier this year, the company offered a similar box for the French presidential election and the owner of 'Paris Chocolat' said the results of the 'chocolate poll' were a very close prediction of the actual election outcome.
He hopes his chocolates do it again this time.
"This straw poll is credible because when we (made the chocolates) for the French election, (our results) were very close to the real vote. Today, we are directly in correlation with what is happening," Monterrat said.
About three weeks ahead of the real election, the 'Paris chocolat' poll showed a clear advantage to President Obama who lead Romney 72 percent to 4 percent, but with only 22 votes registered on the website.
Reflecting the current head to head polls, American and Australian tourists at the Eiffel tower were split evenly when given the choice between the Romney and Obama chocolates.
Australian tourist Richard Greenbrook chose Obama because he preferred the current U.S. President's policies to those of his competitor.
"His political views are more towards the common person and not towards the big business, which is what these guys are about," he said.
Australian tourist Rebecca Ludbrook said she was intrigued by the idea of voting with chocolates.
"For the American election, this means more to us than the actual people's faces, eating the chocolate does, because it's the American election and we're Australian," Ludbrook said.
American tourists Christina Pardy and Nicole Stevenson agreed that chocolate voting tasted better than voting on paper.
Other chocolates in the special edition box are printed with symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties: the donkey and the elephant, respectively.
Republican challenger Mitt Romney and U.S. President Barack Obama are currently neck and neck in opinion polls, with 22 days left on the Election Day clock. Obama leads Romney 59 percent to 31 percent among early voters, according to Reuters/Ispos polling data from recent weeks.
