(phew)
About 64 million people voted in last night’s “American Idol” final thingy-dingy.* Probably a certain percentage of these were people who voted more than once, but we should assume that this sort of thing is limited; people only have access to so many phones, after all. This is well below turnout in the last Presidential election, 122 million, especially when you consider that the voting-eligible population is much larger,† and it’s much easier to vote by phone than it is to show up to a polling station. It’s also just slightly behind turnout in midterm elections, which in 2002 was 80 million. So we need not worry; while it’s clear that Americans will turn out en masse to participate in utterly meaningless elections, slightly more Americans will turn out to participate in slightly less meaningless elections.
* I did not vote - I was watching the season finale of Lost, which is much more important.
† At least a few votes must have been cast by cats who accidentally trod on the telephone keypad. If you do not believe this is possible, ask me sometime about the incident in which my cat deleted the contents of my hard drive.
posted by saurabh in Uncategorized | 4 Comments
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