Celebrity-powered ads, Facebook vote reminders, and early mail-in votes all contributed to what is being called the best voter turnouts in weeks. “We simply haven’t seen this many people vote ever before on Dancing with the Stars,” remarked an astonished Gallup Poll analyst Steve Whittaker. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the celebrity ads reminding people to vote contributed significantly.”
Fans of Dancing with the Stars had advocated the fan vote for months before actually obtaining it. “It took years for television shows in general to stop limiting the vote to celebrity-TV-personas – the so-called “Simon-Crowe-Law” era. We’ve simply come too far for people not to vote,” recalls 43-year-old mother Sarah Franco.
Not all fans have been eager to rock the vote though. A dual American Idol-Dancing with the Stars fan Roger Thornberry explained, “The problem is you have to account for 1/3rd voting power on top of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. You have the in-show dictator voters on top of the fans who vote on the extremes. Does my vote for the attractive-but-not-spectacular vocalist count when it’s such a moderate vote? Not when you have partisan extremists voting for highly talented weirdos like Susan Boyle and Rubin.”
Other voters were concerned that the required email field would lead to a spammed inbox long after they had quit caring about the show.
