Voting early and often

Cindy Sheehan has given up her anti-war crusade and tells us that her son Casey "died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."

Could be she's right. The May 23 finale of American Idol attracted 30.7 million viewers. The 2006 mid-term elections? 76,228,938 voters, a turn-out of 36.8%. Of course, many of those watching American Idol are under 18. In a 2003 survey of 526 "tweens" (used here to mean kids 8-14), about half of them had watched American Idol. Variety reports that although American Idol's ratings are down 20% since last year, it's still the top show in the 18-24 age demographic.

The lengthy finale of Fox's "American Idol" dominated the final night of the television season despite coming in down about 20% vs. a year ago, while ABC's season-ender of "Lost" was also down vs. its close of a year ago but was a strong No. 2 for the night.According to preliminary nationals from Nielsen, "American Idol" is expected to average roughly an 11.5 rating/31 share in adults 18-49 and 30.4 million viewers overall for its finale from 8 to 10:09 p.m., down from the 14.2/35 in the demo and 36.4 million viewers overall when the finale was contained to 124 minutes.

Of course, what's telling is that with a viewership of 30.7 million viewers, the number of votes for this year's finale of AI was 74 million. That's a high turnout even by Chicago standards.