Taylor Hicks, 29, emerged as the winner in the finale of the TV show on Wednesday night in which 63m votes were cast. It is the biggest single voting night in the five-season history of the show. In the 1984 US presidential election, 54.5 million voters backed Ronald Reagan - the most votes obtained by a president. The GuardianThe Brits wouldn't lie to me, would they?
Saturday, May 27, 2006
So This Is What We Do With Democracy
Sorry, Nevsky. American Idols really do get more votes than American Presidents.
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But it's possible to vote more than once in American Idol, in Presidental elections you can only do that on Diebold machines...
ReplyDeleteThis is my favorite piece of oft-repeated silliness. From the Washington Post.
ReplyDelete"More than 125 million Americans -- 64 percent of those ages 18 and older -- went to the polls in last year's [2004] presidential election, according to data scheduled to be released today by the Census Bureau."
Almost twice the number of votes were cast in the most recent presidential election than in the most recent American Idol. Also, Taylor Hicks himself probably did not receive all 63 million votes, but rather, this would have been divided somehow between the two finalists. I doubt of the 63 million votes (not necessarily voters as Nevsky points out), few than 8 million went to Ms. McPhee.
I still say they voted for that twitch Hicks as a way of punking Cowell and showing their disgust with the program.
ReplyDeleteBut to get to the vote totals issue, those vote totals are not about total voters, but votes. You can vote for an individual in that show as many times as you want. The fact is that every contestant has a great many automatic dialers and computer scripts sending in votes for them. There's a damned good chance that the number of actual voters was a fifth of the vote total.
I am entertained that THIS is what people bother to stop and comment on. I mostly posted it just to irritate Nev. I didn't realize it would get everyone else wound up.
ReplyDelete*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh* I'm just a little too tired this week to come up with a more effective or entertaining rant, save to say that if one wishes to show that Americans are a shallow bunch more concerned with vapid entertainment than the world around them, one need not make shit up.
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