American Idol Shocker: The Curse of Plurality Voting

Last night, I was as shocked as Simon Cowell when Ruben Studdard, an excellenet singer, was in the bottom two in votes. Josh Gracin, who the judges clearly had thought had the weakest performances on Tuesday’s show, was safe. In the end, Trenyce was sent home. How did this happen? American Idol suffers from the same problem that our presidential election system does.

I won’t go into all of the detail here, because other sites do that. The basics of it is that the “plurality” system, where the person who gets the highest number of votes wins, makes it possible that someone who is hated could actually get elected. This is particularly true when you’ve got several candidates, like the 5 American Idol finalists.

Let’s say that the breakdown of votes was like this:

Clay: 35%

Kimberly: 30%

Josh: 15%

Ruben: 12%

Trenyce: 8%

Ruben has turned out fabulous performances every week. Perhaps this week, many people who generally voted for Ruben thought that Clay and Kimberly really shone, so they gave them their votes. They probably also assumed that Ruben was unstoppable. Josh probably has a steady fan base that would net him a few percent of the vote no matter what, and he probably also got some sympathy votes from people who didn’t like Simon’s criticism.

So, let’s pretend that’s how it shook out. This means that Josh did not get 85% of the votes. It is possible that 85% of the people watching American Idol thought Josh should go, but instead he ended up #3 out of 5!

Now imagine what the numbers could have looked like if the voting was reversed. If people were to vote for the person they think should be out of the competition it may have looked something like this:

Josh: 60%

Trenyce: 20%

Kimberly: 10%

Clay: 5%

Ruben: 5%

That’s just a hypothetical scenario, but it’s entirely possible that the numbers would work out like that.

This is why our presidential elections get so messy when there are more than two candidates.

When it comes to picking the winner of American Idol, however, there is a saving factor: American Idol essentially has a dozen runoff elections. Even with the problems of plurality voting, because there is a new vote happening each week the final winner will be someone who is generally well liked. If the majority of American Idol voters really don’t like Josh, that would at least come out in the last week when it’s between the two last finalists.

By the way, I’m not into country music, and I don’t think Josh is the strongest singer. But, if I owned a country music label, I’d sign Josh.