Last night saw the final of American Idol, and with it, the largest ever voting public. 97.5 million votes flooded in; an increase from the previous record of 23 million. Now obviously 97.5 million does not directly translate to that amount of people calling or texting in to make their vote count (we are all aware of the group vote, Australian Idol 2007 and the Hillsong church ring any bells?), and to be fair those communities are well within their rights to vote en mass. I'm sure if your best mate/brother/sister's boyfriend/cousins' sisters' nephew was in the competition you would feel compelled to vote numerous times for them, just in case your vote was the one that really mattered. But I digress.
Personally, I'm not really interested in the fact that many American's watch American Idol, it could be worse, or who won for that matter (it was David Cook, a 25 year old bartender from Missouri in case you were wondering). What I am interested in though, is that nearly half the nations population voted for a TV show. I can't even imagine 97.5 million phone calls and text messages, let alone for one TV show.
So, why is it that Americans care so much about their "celebs"? And is that celeb culture rubbing off on us? Will it only be a matter of time, before 10 million Aussies get out their mobile phones during the next season of Big Brother (God, let's hope not!)? And the really big question is, will this many Americans turn out on election day to have their say for their future?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, during the last Federal Election in 2004, 142 million Americans were registered to vote. Of those, 126 million bothered to get to the pooling booths on the big day. That is just over 63% of the population at the time. To give it some context, 32% of the current population voted to determine who would be the American Idol winner. So if 63% of people got it right last time around and 32% at least understand the concept of voting, maybe this year nearly 100% of Americans will get themselves to the polling booth in November. We can only hope.
