Last week American Idol racked up 97 million votes for the two finalists. Enthusiasts were thrilled. Cynics pointed out how sad our civilization has become when American Idol gets more votes than a presidential election. I became an Idol enthusiast this year when they showed the repeats from last season on cable. But I am also cynical. So I decided to look up the numbers.

You don’t have to register to vote for American Idol. And the phrase ‘Vote early and vote often’ took on special meaning a few weeks ago when my wife and I decided that Syesha was going to be eliminated after what we thought was a stellar performance, despite a mediocre performance by David Cook, the eventual winner. My wife picked up the phone and dialed the Syesha number, hung up, hit redial, and kept going for seven or eight votes until the futility of it all sank in. If our experience was normal — if everybody voted eight times, then only 12.1 million or so people really voted last week.

I checked out the Nielson ratings for the two final shows. The Wednesday American Idol finale scored 30 million viewers, up by half a million from last year. But you don’t vote after that show — it is the final performance show on Tuesday that you vote on. And only 19.34 million viewers watched on Tuesday. Doing the math, if every single Tuesday viewer voted 5.02 times you get 97 million votes. If you figure that a lot of people don’t vote — we never voted except that one time, the week before the finale — our eight votes are probably a decent average. 97M/8 = 12,125,000 voters. Give or take a few hundred thousand.

Before looking at the presidential election numbers, here is a quick comparison of the two events:

Time Span
American Idol lasts about three months. The presidential election will have lasted almost three years by the time we vote next November. In my opinion American Idol gets it right on this one. They show us everything we need to know in a reasonable amount of time, eliminating candidates on a regular and predictable basis. I’m fairly sick of the presidential candidates’ antics already, and the general election campaigning hasn’t even started!

Music
American Idol wins hands down on music. While I love a patriotic marching band number as much as the next guy, the performances on American Idol were real toe tappers. None of the musical performances (including the candidates playing instruments on late night television) had the excitement or skill of the Idol performances. You just wouldn’t see Paula Abdul standing up and swaying to ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ And none inspired me to critique the performances — ooh that Sousa march was a little pitchy… Nope.

Talking Heads
This one goes to the presidential election. Idol only has four: Randy, Paula, Simon, and Ryan (who is just supposed to be an announcer, but injects his opinions — mostly of Simon — anyway). Put the news casters have their stars, too. Who doesn’t love it when Fox’s Washington news chief Brit Hume disagrees with NPR’s Juan Williams, intoning ‘Juan, Juan, Juan!’ in a disappointed chant? Or CNN’s Wolf Blitzer — you’ve got to love any guy with a name like Wolf Blitzer. Or NBC’s Tim Russert with his bulldog style of interviewing and his famous white board tallying of votes. Sure, there are a lot of duds on network news, but the good ones are amazing, entertaining, enlightening, and get your juices flowing.

While I love Idol’s judges, they tend to be repetitive, then shine with seminal moments (like when Paula reviewed a performance that hadn’t yet taken place, or when Simon Cowell told Brook White that she was like a hamburger without the bun).

Production Values
American Idol, by a hair. And that’s not saying much, because despite the glitz their production values aren’t so hot. Their new set is worse than their old set, if that’s possible. It is ugly and distracting, and whose idea was it to put the band out of sight on high platforms? On a music show???!!! However, the presidential election sets seem to only have three colors — red, white, and blue (is white technically a color?) and Fox in particular seems hell-bent on making those colors look as ugly as possible. What a relief it was to see John McCain standing in front of a white and green backdrop on Earth Day!

I’ve only seen two seasons of Idol. Last year’s direction, camera work, and choreography was really terrible. I was shocked that a show that rakes in so much money couldn’t spend some of it on decent production staff. This year they seemed to have realized that, and production values were somewhat better. Presidential election camera work isn’t artsy, but it does the job very nicely. But direction is static and predictable, and choreography is nearly nonexistent.

Speeches
The presidential candidates win hands down. While there is nothing more charming than David Archuleta’s self-depreciating mumbles about how great all the other contestants are, this year’s presidential candidates have done something we haven’t seen in a long, long time in politics: they are talking about the issues in a somewhat substantive and interesting way. I’ve rooted for McCain and Obama from the beginning because I thought that if they were the candidates in the general election we’d actually have an intelligent public discussion of the things that are important to Americans, rather than just the same ol’, same ol’ political strategies and dirty tricks. It looks like we may actually get that, and in the meantime we’re hearing distinct points of view about interesting and influential topics. Wow!

Relevance
Idol must be relevant to a lot of Americans or it wouldn’t get such high ratings, and sell so many songs on iTunes and at record stores. But even when Americans don’t think presidential candidates are relevant, they do have more tangible effect on Americans’ lives than Idols do. For example a president who is strong on the economy can create an atmosphere in which you can afford all the CDs the Idols churn out.

In terms of the overall experience I like Idol better, but I spend more time paying attention to the presidential election. It is just the nature of the beast — every four years it’s the election you love to hate.

Now for the stats from the last presidential election: of about 215.69 million eligible voters, about 142.07 registered to vote. That’s 65.9%. 125.7 million voted, 58.3% of eligible voters. So the adage is untrue. Many more people vote in the presidential election than vote for an American Idol. And while the Idol voters may be more passionate as evidenced by their multiple votes (some presidential voters cast more than one vote, too, but the majority only cast one), 3/5s of the American public are doing their duty when it comes to voting for the most powerful leader in the world.

There were 28.7 million more votes for president in 2004 than there were for American Idol in 2008. And almost every single one of those presidential votes represented a single voter. So while John McCain or Barack Obama may not sell as many CDs as David Cook eventually will, they will get more votes and influence more lives. That’s good for our country. The system works. People are engaged. Phew!