Imagine you're at home on a Saturday night when your phone rings, and it's a 21-year-old American calling from New York, telling you to vote for Shorten or Turnbull in the Australian election.

He's not paid - he just feels so strongly about the issues of the campaign that he's decided to try and influence a foreign election.

That's exactly what's happening to hundreds of people in California at the moment - only it's the other way round. There's a group of hardcore Bernie Sanders fans in Australia who are using their free time to call strangers in the US, to help him beat Hillary Clinton and become the Democrat nominee for the presidential election.

There are groups like this all around Australia, and in Sydney last Sunday half a dozen Bernie mega fans were cold-calling California, which has its primary next week.

One of them was Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd, a 32-year-old Sydneysider.

"I've been watching for ages but I've finally got the courage to join the campaign," he said. "Lots of them went unanswered. I probably changed five people's minds."

"It felt like a spam call. It was giving me flashbacks to being a telemarketer."

Also they couldn't understand my accent. And there was a huge delay."

Because voting is not mandatory in the US, parties go to lots of trouble just to convince their supporters to get out and vote. The kind of phone-banking being done by the Sanders supporters is one of the most common methods used by the parties to convince people. As a result, potential voters receive massive numbers of calls before polling day, particularly in battleground states.

The result in California could decide the whole Democrat primary race.

Donald Trump has already reached the number of delegates needed to win the Republican presidential nomination, but the Democrat race is much closer. Clinton has 1,769 delegates, and Sanders 1,501 - they each need 2,383 delegates to win the nomination.

California has 475 delegates up for grabs, more than double the next closest.

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Wyatt says he hasn't given up hope for Sanders.

"No god no, but if he doesn't get it, screw that country. Give them Trump to teach them a lesson."

When Hack points out Australia is in the middle of an election campaign, and that Wyatt could be supporting a Bernie-style progressive Australian candidate, he replies:

"The only answer I can come up with is that I'm just so sick of the parties in Australia".

It's Bernie. It's justice. It's the vibe

According to Dr Thomas Adams, a lecturer at the Sydney University's United States Studies Centre, Australians like Wyatt and the others manning the phone banks are part of an emerging global movement of post-GFC progressive politics.

"Global progressive politics has been out in cold for 30-40 years," he said. "There's a feeling of being a part of something - that a basic standard of living should be a right, that militarisation should be dialed back, health care and tertiary education should be rights."

Sanders has ridden this wave in the US, while in the UK it has driven the rise of Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the success of the radical left in Greece and Spain.

"Something is going on that doesn't look like anything many people have seen in their lifetimes," Dr Adams said.

But he says Australia hasn't yet produced its own version of Sanders or Corbyn, and that partly explains his special status among some Australians.

"For some people it's the first time in their generation the issues are back on the table - that's why they spend a few hours on a Saturday helping out the Sanders campaign."

Hack hasn't found any evidence of Australians cold-calling for the Clinton or Trump campaigns, and Dr Adams said he doubted there would be any. Trump has even lower popularity ratings overseas than he does in his home country (in recent surveys about 7 in 10 of Americans have an "unfavourable view" of him), while Clinton is seen as beholden to a powerful and well-moneyed party machine that has alienated many Sanders voters.

But all bets will be off if Trump gets close to becoming President, says Dr Adams. Die-hard Sanders supporters could end up backing Clinton.

"If it was Clinton versus Trump you'd probably see Australians making calls to the US on behalf of Clinton, but mainly against Trump."

"The palpable fear of Trump around the world would bring people out to help where they can."

'That's one vote I got for Bernie'

The founder and prime mover of this Sydney group of Sanders supporters is a 21-year-old student from Germany, Johann Mathis Duhrsen. Apart from organising dozens of cold-call volunteers, Johann himself has made 6200 calls on behalf of Sanders.

He saw nothing strange about migrating to one country and then actively campaigning for a candidate in a third country, on the other side of the world.

"To me it makes zero moral difference where they run, it's about making the world a better place by electing better leaders."

"If there was a machine that could produce the ideal political candidate - something like Bernie would come out of that machine for me."

He could run in Bangladesh and I would still want to support him."

As well as suggesting politics is becoming more globalised, the volunteers helping Sanders in Australia also point to another emerging force - internet call services like Google Voice that make dialing a California voter from Sydney that much easier and cheaper.

This kind of technology simply wasn't accessible at the time of the last great grassroots US election campaign - Barack Obama in 2008.

The Sanders volunteers have online access to a voter registry with the phone numbers of all registered voters. They're automatically connected to random voters.

"Bernie's campaign has a revolutionary dialer system," said Johann. "You finish a call and 5-20 seconds after that you get the next call - it's really automated so you can do lots of calls."

"About 4 out of 10 is the wrong number or bad reception."

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Like other Sanders volunteers, the work of the Sydney group was completely unsupervised. Johann acknowledged there was a risk of someone sabotaging the campaign, but said he'd never heard of that happening.

Despite the massive attention given to the primary elections, only a small proportion of eligible voters actually turn out to vote - this primary season it's been about 17 per cent for the Republicans and 12 per cent for the Democrats.

This is partly to do simply with the confusion over who is eligible. As a result, part of the cold-callers job is to explain the system to voters.

"We give them information to get out to vote, we explain this is the deadline, this is the website where need to register."

"We walk them through making a plan."

Johann said that morning he had called a woman in California, she explained she wasn't eligible to vote, he explained she could get a special "crossover ballot".

"She was insistent," he said. "She said, 'I can't vote'."

"I said, 'Go to this website and request a crossover ballot'. She was, like, 'Yes they've changed that, oh wow, that's so helpful."

"That's one confirmed vote I got for Bernie."