{"id":144,"date":"2007-05-02T14:56:02","date_gmt":"2007-05-02T18:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=133"},"modified":"2007-05-02T14:56:02","modified_gmt":"2007-05-02T18:56:02","slug":"american-idol-voting-is-flawed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/05\/02\/american-idol-voting-is-flawed\/","title":{"rendered":"American Idol Voting is Flawed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just to prove that operations research is relevant everywhere, Ed Kaplan<\/a> of Yale University has pointed out a fundamental flaw in the voting process for American Idol<\/em><\/a>. It appears that lots of people get busy signals when trying to vote for “their” idol. This may appear to be simply a frustration but actually gets to the heart of the fairness of the voting system. As Ed argues in an op-ed at the Hartford Courant<\/a>, if votes are limited due to phone capacity, and each candidate has a separate line (each with the same capacity), then the votes will by necessity be much more evenly spread than the electorate. So a runaway winner can turn into a coin-toss.<\/p>\n

In the best OR tradition, Ed not only identifies the problem but solves it:<\/p>\n

There is a simple solution to this problem that does not require “American Idol” to install additional phone capacity. Instead of assigning each contestant a personal phone number, use a single number for all voting, and have voters select their favorite by pushing a button after the call has gone through. This simple fix would equalize the chance of encountering a busy signal for all callers.<\/p>\n

Many votes would still be lost. In fact, if the total phone capacity was left unchanged, more calls would be lost due to the increase in processing time per call necessitated by button-pushing. But, since all calls would have the same chance of getting through, the total votes received would be a representative sample of votes cast.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If only OR people ran the world, even American Idol<\/em> would run better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just to prove that operations research is relevant everywhere, Ed Kaplan of Yale University has pointed out a fundamental flaw in the voting process for American Idol. It appears that lots of people get busy signals when trying to vote for “their” idol. This may appear to be simply a frustration but actually gets to … Continue reading “American Idol Voting is Flawed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-or-in-the-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}