In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, there were officially 62,040,610 votes for George W. Bush.

The producers of American Idol have stated that there were approximately 73,650,000 votes for Kelly Clarkson in the first season. While I'm not privy to the details of their tabulations, the information that I could gather seems to imply that they recorded the number of votes by unique Caller ID telephone numbers, and probably was over the length of the season, not just in the final vote. However, since duplicate votes were weeded out, a person voting for Kelly 10 times after 10 different shows would only count as 1 vote, not 100. Using this method, they were also able to count the most recent vote of callers who may have, say, voted for Justin early in the season, but changed their vote to Kelly in the final show. Of course, there would be some small error due to people moving and/or changing phone numbers in the middle of the season, or by callers using both their home phone and cell phone.

I'm sure that your first reaction is going to be that many people have Caller ID turned off on their phones and so their method couldn't work. Well, I worked in the telecom industry, and I can tell you that it's a dirty little secret that Caller ID blocking is only for the individual customers. Anyone that has a call center or something like that uses T-1 lines (which is something like a bundle of 24 telephone lines) with ANI (Automatic Number Identification) or PRI (Primary Rate Interface), both of which provide the calling number whether the caller blocks their Caller ID or not.

Huh? Those numbers certainly do prove the original fact, namely that:
• More people voted for Kelly Clarkson on American Idol than for George W. Bush in the last Presidential election.

But for your other questions...

In the 2004 Presidential election, 122,293,332 votes were cast, of which 62,040,610 were for Bush.

In the first season of American Idol, there were approximately 165,500,000 people voting, of which 73,650,000 recorded their last votes for Kelly Clarkson Note that this is across the season, so some people voted early in the season, but not during the final show, which is why it seems that Clarkson doesn't have a majority, but during the final show, she did. Furthermore, there were around 425,000,000 total votes cast (of which 236,000,000 were for Clarkson), but in the this analysis, we're only looking at one vote per phone (person), not actual votes, to keep the comparison fair when comparing it to the Presidential elections.

Didn't they actually have a show based on that principle? I think it was pulled before it even aired. The idea was that the winner would actually be placed on the US ballot for president.

in idols you can vote as many times as you want

I think they're pointing out that on both American Idol, nearly every Internet poll, most of Louisiana, and good chunks of most other states, that one can vote as many times as one wants.

(But there's a detailed explaination above about why that isn't relevant to the basis behind the factoid.)

hi all