American Idol should vote off the lowest cumulative votes
 

American Idol is stupid.

Why vote people off based on how many votes they get each week? Why not vote someone off based on the cumulative, or total votes they have had since the top 12? That way, no favorite will be accidently be voted off due to some anomaly, (e.g. Tamyra, Chris Daughtery). I give AI props for changing the top 32 into voting 2 off each time from a big group, because in the past, some groups were heavily inflated with good people, but come on. CHANGE THIS, idiots.

I've never watched the show, so I'm going what I've heard from others and what I've read in the newspaper, but wouldn't you want their performance each week to actually matter in the short term? I guess I kind of look at it like the NCAA basketball tournament, you have to be on your game every week.

Don't give a damn about the voting, but I agree with that.

This is a really bad idea. The problem is that a person can start strong and still remain in the competition despite poor performances once they build a following. And that's the thing with AI. Once people pick their horses, they stick with them until the end.

Besides, the voting has bigger problems (namely, vote as much as you want).

I'm not sure that would work. Take last season and Bo Bice for instance. During the intial auditions and then the Hollywood auditions, he was unseen. I don't think he got ten seconds of airtime until they sent him through to the voting rounds. Since nobody really knew who we was, he wouldn't have gotten a lot of votes in the early rounds. It was only after Simon praised him and good performances that he started to take off. If he had low totals from early rounds, it might've been a case of too little too late for him to get to the finals.

If you've been watching the DialIdol numbers, Chris's elimination was not an "anomoly" and shouldn't have been unexpected. His numbers have been going down, while Elliott's have been going up.

Plus that takes away the impetus to call and vote for your favorites every single week.

Bad idea.

1. That is part the excitement of AI
2. Taylor Hicks would be almost assured of being the winner by now, no suspense in the show.
-It would be cool if the publish the week by week numbers after the show is over.
3. The way they had it setup now makes for good TV drama.

Go Taylor!