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The Inquisitr reports:
On [December 7], Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders won the readers' poll for TIME's Person of the Year, which was conducted online.
The 74-year-old Senator won by [a] landslide, beating out other world-renowned leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and even U.S. President Barack Obama.
[...] Bernie Sanders won [with] more than 10 percent of the total online votes, while his closest contender, Malala Yousafzai, a young Pakistani activist that fights for the education rights of girls in her country, only got 5.2 percent of the votes.
Aside from beating the U.S. president in the online poll, Bernie Sanders also overran his toughest competitors: Donald Trump (1.8%) and Hillary Clinton (1.4%).
[...] No U.S. presidential candidate has ever won the Person of the Year award prior to the results of the election. However, the fact that Sanders topped the poll is testament that there are still people who will choose to go for someone with whom they share similar views as opposed to someone who is "popular". [Submitter's quote marks; see "Nate Silver", below]
But while Sanders' cause may be noble, which is mostly likely why he earned the top spot in the Person of the Year online poll, it wasn't enough for him to take home the prize. Reportedly, Sanders' name was taken out of the short list from which the editors of TIME [were] supposed to make their choice for Person of the Year.
[...] TIME released the names of the eight finalists for the annual award on [December 8] [...] Sanders and his runner-up Yousafzai were not included in the list of finalists. The finalists included Putin, Trump, Rouhani, former Olympian and transgender Caitlyn Jenner, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Black Lives Matter activists, and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, leader of jihadist group Islamic State.
On [December 9], TIME announced the winner during NBC's Today show. Angela Merkel was the unanimous choice of the TIME editors, making her the second individual woman to ever win the award.
The editors second choice was Trump.
This complete disregard for the readers' poll is hardly unprecendented, as demonstrated by the results from 2006:
Hugo Chavez wins "Person of the Year" poll; Time magazine ignores result
Unsurprising to many, AlterNet reports that Trump's presence in corporate media's coverage of the presidential contest is wildly disproportionate to his acceptance by USAian voters.
Trump's true level of support, [according to phenomenally accurate pollster Nate Silver, is] 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate--or roughly "the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked", the pollster said.
Previous: Bernie Sanders Leads TIME Magazine's Person of the Year Readers' Poll
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @12:28PM
It's like just about any vote, it just makes you feel like you participated, but the people in control are going to make some decision unrelated to your opinion anyway.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday December 14 2015, @02:30PM
Now, I'm a sanders supporter, approximately speaking, but I can understand an editorial board not selecting someone for recognition their achievements and impact based on their current popularity in an election. Sanders has a much bigger popularity contest to win coming up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 14 2015, @03:09PM
I agree with you here. Its like when Obama got a peace prize before he even took office.
Lets give these awards to people that have done something, not to candidates.
That being said, that there is so much hand wringing over an essentially meaningless title is completely useless.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday December 14 2015, @06:05PM
> Its like when Obama got a peace prize before he even took office.
When your memory lies, Google is your friend.
Obama got the fourth "you're not W" peace prize in 2009, right AFTER he took office. (the first three recipients were Carter, the IAEA, the IPCC).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @09:34PM
The Nobel Foundation Taken to Court on the Peace Prize [dissidentvoice.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @09:27PM
I can understand an editorial board not selecting someone for recognition [of] their achievements and impact based on their current popularity
Bernie has been a public servant since 1981.
Representing the people of an area that has a heavy Republican presence, this guy fights against the overt greed-driven anti-worker mean-spiritedness that has become so common in Lamestream Media and government.
He is the inverse of e.g. Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
Bernie's message is drawing crowds of 20,000 and more.
No other candidate comes close.
Finding a venue large enough to accommodate all the folks who want to attend is the biggest hurdle his campaign encounters.
If TIME's recognition is supposed to represent the zeitgeist, Bernie is the poster boy.
...but we have to recognize the demographic of readers of TIME.
Other guys with important messages which Lamestream Media did their best to marginalize: Eugene Debs (we got WWI and the Red Purge instead) and Henry Wallace (we got the Cold War, the Deep State, and Taft-Hartley instead).
N.B. I don't think Bernie goes far enough (e.g. not rejecting war) but he has a message that folks should hear and think about and no one else among the Reds and Blues seems to think that government should be giving consideration to Joe Average (instead of just Wall Street and megacorporations).
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 14 2015, @09:51PM
One of the issues is the first past the post system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE [youtube.com]
As an extreme example lets say you have twenty candidates. Lets say 10 percent of voters vote for candidate one. 85 percent of voters are split evenly between twelve candidates and the rest are split evenly between the remaining candidates. So it looks like this
Candidate 1 --> 10 percent
Candidates 2 - 13 --> 85 percent
Candidates 14 - 20 --> 5 percent
So candidate one only have ten percent of the vote. Now lets say the other 90 percent of people absolutely hate candidate 1. They can't vote against candidate 1 and so their votes get split between other candidates. Candidate one wins despite the majority of people disagreeing with him/her. But they had little choice, they can't vote against a candidate so they must split their votes among other candidates.
Had everyone been able to vote for another candidate after their favorite candidate was eliminated someone else would have been elected. and that's what the alternative vote simulates. It finds the next candidate that the majority of people who are split when it comes to their first choice would choose as their second (or third) choices and hence finding a candidate that most people can agree (more) upon.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday December 15 2015, @12:53AM
One of the issues is the first past the post system....Had everyone been able to vote for another candidate after their favorite candidate was eliminated someone else would have been elected...
So preferential voting [wikipedia.org] may be a way of efficiently voting against as well as for someone?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 19 2015, @04:02PM
A problem with first past the post is that votes for someone else get spread across multiple other candidates which diminishes the effect of their intent to be votes against someone.