American Idol voting |
VoteFair Ballot |
You can vote just once (this year!).
Although multiple votes from the same voter are removed,
you can tell other fans of your favorite to vote here.
The current results of this cross-season poll (after removing duplicates) reveal that fans of David Archuleta are well-networked and telling one another to vote here. Thank you, everyone, for voting here!
Remember that the VoteFair.org website (look in the upper right corner) is ready to calculate poll, survey, and election results free for you! After you create your poll/election, put the supplied link into your Facebook or MySpace page or your organization's website so that visitors or members can vote conveniently.
If you haven't already read it, please read the What's going on in the 2008 Presidential elections? commentary on the VoteFair News page. It reveals what news story currently is not being covered, yet it's likely to become a hot news story.
Season 7 commentary
Congratulations, David Cook!
The final VoteFair poll results indicated that David Archuleta was slightly more popular than David Cook, so what happened?
Having the phone lines open for four hours surely limited the late-night and after-midnight calls from younger fans. David Archuleta has more young fans than David Cook, so this gave an advantage to older fans, and therefore David Cook. This alone could account for the surprise result.
The VoteFair poll cannot predict this kind of surprise because this poll does not have the same conditions—especially limited hours and multiple votes—that characterize the official voting. These differences easily account for the result differences. Also remember that this was a close race in both the official results and the VoteFair poll. When a race is close, anything can happen.
Answering a visitor's question
A visitor here has asked an excellent question: “I don't fully understand how results are tallied for the different voting methods. Why, for instance, in the AI poll, is David A ranked 2nd when he has so many more votes than David C? AI allows voting as many times as one wants, and whoever has the most votes wins. I guess I just don't get the results.”
Let's compare these three different ways of voting:
- “VoteFair ranking” in which each voter casts one “order-of-preference” ballot.
- “First-choice-only” (or “plurality”) vote counts using just the first choice from each “order-of-preference” ballot.
- Official AI “plurality” voting in which a voter can cast multiple “first-choice-only” votes.
Using the results from last week's poll, here are the “plurality” vote counts using just the first choice from each “order-of-preference” ballot:
- David Archuleta: 1,248 votes
- Jason Castro: 928 votes
- David Cook: 811 votes
- Syesha Mercado: 100 votes
On the surface it appears that David Archuleta is the most popular. This belief is reinforced by the fact that all U.S. elections presume that the person with the most first-choice votes deserves to be the “winner”.
Yet VoteFair ranking calculates these results:
- First-most popular: David Cook
- Second-most popular: David Archuleta
- Third-most popular: Jason Castro
- Fourth-most popular: Syesha Mercado
Why is David Cook ranked first even though he has fewer first-choice votes than either David Archuleta or Jason Castro? Look in the Data and Calculation Summary section of the results, and you will see that, based on 3,109 ballots (from 3,109 voters), here are the relevant comparisons:
- 1,547 voters prefer David Cook over David Archuleta, and 1,501 (a smaller number of) voters prefer David Archuleta over David Cook, and 61 voters ranked these two singers as equally preferred.
- 1,646 voters prefer David Cook over Jason Castro, and 1,380 (a smaller number of) voters prefer Jason Castro over David Cook, and 83 voters ranked these two singers as equally preferred.
These numbers reveal that more voters prefer David Cook over David Archuleta, and that more voters prefer David Cook over Jason Castro. This is why VoteFair ranking indicates that David Cook is actually the most popular—in this poll.
How can this be? The important point is that “order-of-preference” ballots reveal whether the voter prefers David Cook or David Archuleta even when the voter's first choice is Jason Castro or Syesha Mercado. Similarly, when a voter indicates a first choice of David Archuleta or Syesha Mercado, the voter also indicates whether they prefer David Cook or Jason Castro. In other words, VoteFair ranking takes into account important information that first-choice-only counts completely ignore.
Hopefully it's now apparent why last week David Cook was indicated here as a possible early elimination. He may actually be the most popular (in that week), yet he is next-to-last based on first-choice-only votes (in this poll).
Of course the official AI vote counts are different because they allow a voter to vote many times. Some people believe that the results can still be fair as long as voters also put in some votes for their second-favorite and maybe their third-favorite. Unfortunately that's not a valid belief. In fact, even if, somehow, everyone put in three votes for their favorite, two votes for their second-favorite, and one vote for their third-favorite (and no votes for their least favorite), the results would not always be fair. In fact this result is calculated and appears under the name “Borda count”, and in this case the Borda-count method mistakenly suggests that David Archuleta is most popular (in this recent poll result).
Why was Michael Johns eliminated early?
Unlike the other seven singers, Michael Johns did not receive a concentration of first-choice votes from an established large fan base willing to continuously dial his phone number. That happened because, relatively speaking, he does not appeal to any ready-made, well-defined, and well-networked fan base. In contrast, keeping in mind that averages do not apply to individuals, consider that rock-music fans would tend to concentrate votes on David Cook, country-music fans would tend to concentrate votes on Kristy Lee Cook, African Americans would tend to concentrate votes on Syesha Mercado, female pre-teens and teens would tend to concentrate votes on Jason Castro and David Archuleta, fans of female musicians would tend to concentrate votes on Brooke White (as the most popular female singer), conservative adults would tend to concentrate votes on David Archuleta and Brooke White, and rebellious teenagers and vocal-quality-conscious musicians would tend to concentrate votes on Carly Smithson. Why didn't the previous week's VoteFair poll predict his early elimination? Because in this poll each voter votes only once, whereas the official voting allows dedicated fans to vote as many times as the phone system can handle. Note that vote concentration is the flip side of vote splitting.
American Idol poll
