American Election Idol

John McCain: 57,434,084 - 46.1%

Barack Obama: 65,431,955 - 52.6%

Sanjaya Malakar, Voted Off in Week 4, Ranked in the Bottom 2

Once again, the American Idol Effect has helped eliminate the obvious losers, as demonstrated by the choices shown above and their respective election results. Even the vote-for-the-worst strategy of the Republican party didn't pan out. Our participative culture actually got off the couch and voted in their local polling places instead of through a cell phone. According to Wikipedia, our touchstone of truthiness, 124,372,419 million voted this year.

"The voter turnout for this election was broadly predicted to be very high. One widely publicized early estimate predicted turnout of 136.6 million people or 64% of the voting population—which would have been the highest rate in 100 years. However, as of 1 p.m. Eastern Time on November 9th, with 99.6% of the precincts reporting, the total number of votes stands at only 124.47 million, just 2.2 million more than in the 2004 election."

While Sniffipedia may think that a 2% increase is just only a little increase, it should be hailed, as in 2004 fewer people voted for the winning candidate George Bush (62,040,610 votes) than voted for the winning American Idol contestant Fantasia Barrino (65 million votes). This year, Idol winner David Cook did not receive more votes than either McCain or Obama, although his 54.2 million votes were an impressive share of the all-time Idol high vote of 97 million.