An Idol Clarification

I'm feeling rather behind on my online journaling. I set an unofficial goal of twenty entries this month. With this entry, I'll be four shy of the mark. I suppose it could be argued that an entry about the number of entries one writes doesn't really count, so I should probably write something substantive. What would be substantive, but not too heavy for a Friday, especially a Friday before a holiday weekend?

While I think about that, I thought I would try to clear up any confusion that may have been caused by something Ryan Seacrest said on Wednesday's American Idol. Before announcing the winner, he told the audience that the show had tallied 63.4 million votes, more votes than any president in history ever received.

I fear his statement may lead the average person to believe that Americans care more about who is the next Idol than who is the next president. I want the average person to know that isn't the case for me. It might not seem like it considering I voted twenty times for Taylor and only once in the last presidential election, but it's true. If I could, I would vote twenty-one times in the next election to prove how much I care, but I don't think it would be possible without risking jail time.

I also want the average person to know that Americans care more about presidents than they do about Idols. The best way to prove it is to show that more people voted in the last election than in this year's American Idol finale. Since it requires more work to establish how many people voted in American Idol, we'll get that over with first.

My first assumption is that your typical Idol voter is a determined teenaged girl with a fully charged cell phone and the contestant's number programmed in speed dial. Let's assume she had an entire season to perfect a system for voting and she is able to cast one vote every three seconds. There were 14,400 seconds in the allotted four-hour voting period, which gave her enough time to cast 4,800 votes. But let's assume she only got through one out of every ten times. That means she successfully cast 480 votes. If we divide 63.4 million by 480, it would be possible for just 132,000 teenaged girls to produce the stated number of votes.

Of course, a major assumption here is that the teenaged girl only focused on the task of voting for her Idol, which is unrealistic. Everybody knows that teenagers are easily distracted and like to multi-task. In the real world, she would be using the same cell phone to talk to and text message her friends (who were also voting), while also being online to send email and instant messages to her other friends.

During the voting period, she may have been studying, but that is highly unlikely. It's more reasonable to assume she was updating her MySpace account, listening to Kelly Clarkson on her iPod, watching Idol Extra on television and surfing the American Idol site for bonus clips from the show.

We know that multi-tasking is extremely inefficient. Working on tasks in parallel takes longer than working on them in series. To account for this inefficiency, let's assume she was only able to dedicate ten percent of her attention to voting. That means forty-eight votes per girl and that means it would take 1,320,000 teenaged girls to produce 63.4 million votes. Of course, it's sexist to assume that only teenaged girls would vote, so we will simply say teenagers.

The number of voters seems very low, so I think my assumption that a multi-tasking teenager votes at ten percent efficiency is generous. I'll cut that percentage in half and assume they accounted for 31.7 million votes. I'll then assume one person per vote for the rest of the votes. That means that roughly 33 million people voted.

In the last presidential election (also known as Presidential Election: Season 55), nearly 122,300,000 people voted. I've linked to the Wikipedia article because it takes less time to load than the PDF file of the official Federal Elections 2004 results. Doing the math, one can see that 89 million more people voted in the last presidential election than in the American Idol finale, which proves beyond a doubt what Americans care more about.

By pure coincidence, a Southerner with gray hair won in both cases. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if one were to show pictures of both men to people on the street, more could identify Taylor "Soul Patrol" Hicks than could identify George "Border Patrol" Bush.