If Bristol Palin won the finals of Dancing With The Stars wouldn't that expose on of the largest flaws in voter influenced competitions?

WHO THE FUCK CARES ABOUT DANCING WITH THE STARS???

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Hooooo! Let me get my breath! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! (Bent over, holding self up by bracing hands against thighs.) Make a mockery? Would it not have to be something serious to begin with before we could make a mockery of it?

If you can dance a tango and not have people laugh harder than that, then that might be serious.

The fact she’s still in the competition after consistently coming in last week after week in professional judging (and before our own eyes) already does that.

@ETpro Ahem…ahem…. dare anyone mention Tea Party votes…...

If tea partiers are voting to keep her on this show, I quit this country. Also, proof please…

@kenmc If this is true “DWTS glitch”:link and possibly here.

That flaw is already very exposed. That’s why So You Think You Can Dance is a search for the country’s favorite dancer, and why attractive teenage boys always do so predictably well on the singing shows.

My query would be, how the fuck is she even remotely considered to be a “star!?!”

@ucme They introduce her as “teen advocate”. What the heck is that and how is that a “star”?

Dancing with the Stars, and similar shows, are popularity contests, not dancing contests. If you want to see bad dancing, check out Anne Widdecombe’s Paso Doble on the UK version, Strictly Come Dancing. She’s still in the competition, despite being atrociously bad, because the public enjoy watching just how bad she is.

she’s famous for being an ex Member of Parliament and a septugenarian virgin

@meiosis She’s affectionately known as Doris Karloff, for obvious reasons :¬)

I actually try to stop myself from worrying about this by telling myself that people genuinely feel for this girl. As @noelleptc mentions, her story is really human. She’s a child, and the amount of shit she’s had to put up with in public would just devastate most people of her age.

I find myself wanting to vote for her, despite the fact that when Sarah pops on the screen my fists clench and my teeth as well.

No. Sanjaya has already opened the world’s eyes to this hot button issue.

@noelleptc I wish people like you, @Hypocrisy_Central, would just back the hell off and let her dance without bitchin about who’s voting for her. It is not who votes for her but how they do it. As much as entertainment, it is suppose to be it is also a dance competition, and if they want to stay true to that they should not want people exploiting the system to rank dancers solely off the fact they like them even if the Situation could out dance them. What did our last Cowboy President say? We are a nations of rules and the order of law. If those who think she dance better than a water buffalo with two left club feet let them vote up to the amount per mode they are suppose to, not a bloc of them sitting over their keyboard racking up points of phantom people. When bamboozling like that happen on Wall Street people want to jump up and down and cry fair. If you will go on record and say she is one of the top 2 dancers on DWTS this year and get 3 dancing judges to agree I will say no more about it.

^^on that note… How else can you explain Bush winning two terms? Gore and Kerry were bores, but everyone wanted to have a beer with Bush. sigh

@ETpro Ah what the heck do those judges know about talent. Just kidding I don’t even watch the show but my mom and sister does.

It’s a POPULARITY contest. Then they should ax the judges and just have other celebs up their like Ellen to plug who they want to see advance damn if they can execute a proper fox trot or their rumba has less rum than a can of V8 juice. If it is all for popularity the judges trying to give guidance on how well or worse the dancer did is just slowing down the action, might as well fill the dead time with guest performances.

I think this shows that the judges scores should carry more weight than the home viewers votes. It should be about who is dancing the best, not a popularity contest.

@chyna – I tend to disagree with that. It’s not solely a popularity contest, as the scores are weighed 50% judges, 50% audience. Generally, those who get sent home should be sent home around the time that they are…and in the end you really do end up with the best two or three of the couples. At that point, it’s really about how many people are on team X as opposed to team Y – but that’s not objectively unfair at all. This season has been a shocking example in terms of the results, and the hosts and judges and dances and contestants have all seemed to recognize that.

The reason why I like them weighted equally is that the show is about both the dancing and the, to put it in a corny way, journey. The judges can really only look at you in terms of the technique, taking slightly into account the improvement of the dancer. The people voting look at the person dancing – how much they’re committed, how much they’ve grown, etc.

Bristol Palin has had a lot of good technique throughout the competition, but she hasn’t been connecting with the music. On her last performance, she connected with the music in a way she hadn’t before… and the judges recognized that. She really broke through a wall. Objectively, I think that Brandy should have gone up against Jennifer Grey in the end. However, although the elimination was shocking, Bristol had put in some amazing work, and had done something the previous evening the judges had been wanting to see her do the entire season. Anyone who wants to check on that should watch her performances again on Hulu, and watch the judges reactions to what she had done.

Personally, I feel the anger that I experienced (and I did) when I heard about the outcome was based on my dislike of her mother. The more I distance myself from it, I just disagree and am a bit sad for Brandy that she’s not where she should be.

Ok I see your points and pretty much agree with you. But how do the judges weigh someone who has never danced and has no idea going in what they are doing as opposed to someone who has danced their whole life?

@chyna – well, of course, there are people you know aren’t going to make it, people who you know will, and those who surprise you. The judges knowledge of how familiar the person is with dancing may skew their scoring – but when scoring is based on subjective observations, even when the people scoring are experts, you always get some of that knowledge influencing the result. That’s why you have multiple judges, each very, very different. And often they’ll diverge a bit – but more often the scores are the same across the board or differ by a single point.

Basically, it’s the most objective form of subjective scoring.