There's nothing like a little mathematical rigor to dispel the myth of drama in reality TV.
We hate to admit two things: first, that we watch Fox TV's American Idol and second, that the contest is not as close as it appears.
While it may be the case that American's are truly divided on such issues (red and blue, and all of that), we suspect that it is the "idle" voting system that is accounting for the tightness of the contest, not a closely divided American public.
In the 2003 vote, around 240 million calls were made to the phone lines, but only 24 million calls got through. Thus, only one in ten calls did not get a busy signal.
Suppose that, indeed, one contestant has far more fans than the other, and as soon as voting begins both groups start to call. To keep things simple, let's assume fans keep dialing if they get a busy signal. If the phone system is not fast enough, then we might find ourselves in a situation where the voting closes, yet there are still fans on both sides trying to dial. While, of course, there are a lot more fans of the more popular contestant that are left dialing at the end, the vote totals are due to the callers who got through. Since the phone lines accept calls at roughly the same rate, the vote totals for the two contestants will be much closer than the actual fan base would indicate.
