George Bush Bests Taylor Hicks
Thanks, Ryan Seacrest, for making Americans look like morons who care more about who wins a TV contest than U.S. presidential elections.
US pop show victor attracts more votes than any president. US idol more popular than the president.
These are a couple headlines that came up from around the world in a Thursday Google news search about American Idol votes. They're shocking. And they're just not true.
During Wednesday night's 2-hour finale, Seacrest announced that 63.4 million votes were cast. "That's more than any president in the history of our country has ever received," he said. Technically, it's true. The number of total votes for this talent show face-off did exceed the number of winning votes in any U.S. presidential election. But the two foreign news outlets above misinterpreted a statement that drew a random, misleading comparison.
George W. Bush set a record in 2004 with 62 million votes. But John Kerry also got 59 million votes. More than 122 million votes were cast in the last presidential election, which, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, had the highest turnout of eligible voters since 1968. That's almost twice as many votes as were cast in the American Idol finale. And you can only vote once for president.
I know I called in about five votes per week when my favorite Idol contestant was still standing. Since I can't find better statistics about how many times people vote, (Idol doesn't release the same stats as the Census Bureau) let's assume I'm the average fan. 63 million divided by five is 12.6 million. What if that were closer to the total number of voters who cast Idol ballots?
The battle between Idol finalists Taylor Hicks and Katherine McPhee was supposed to be close, and according to dialidol.com, a Website that predicts the winner based on busy signals, McPhee's score was 8 points lower than Hicks'. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that these numbers translate fairly into percentage points. That would mean around 7.3 million voters called in or texted for Hicks. And if that is the case, it would be correct to say that almost as many people voted for Hicks as voted for Ross Perot for president in 1996, or voted in the 2003 California recall election.
My math may be fuzzy, but my point is this: Sure, Americans could be more involved in the political process. But we deserve more credit than Seacrest suggests.
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