Daily Variety has a story about the vast number of votes cast during the recent season of American Idol:

Voters turned out in record numbers for the sixth edition of Fox's "American Idol."

Overall, 609 million votes were cast through the five-month run of the show, besting last year's top figure of 578 million, according to Telescope, the Los Angeles-based company that processes the "Idol" votes. When the show started in 2002, 110 million votes were phoned.

Those vote totals include SMS entries. Last year the number of text votes were out of this world:

Last year, 64.5 million SMS messages were sent via Cingular.

Exact numbers on SMS votes aren't available yet, but you can bet they were huge, especially when you consider this:

This year, the company launched new "Idol"-themed content, in the form of video and other downloads, to encourage more customers to use its new mobile offerings.

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