Snow defeats Targaryen in tight 'Game of Thrones' election
It seems you do know something about elections, Jon Snow.
With a whopping 1,666,642 ballots cast in a fantasy online Game of Thrones election, conducted over the past four weeks by HBO, the 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch and current "King in the North" has once again been handed a political title he didn't really ask for.
Winning with just 35% of the vote -- roughly where GOP candidate Donald Trump has been sitting in the polls for months -- Snow and his running mate Lady Lyanna Mormont eked out a victory largely because his opposition was divided three ways.
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The dream team of Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister got 32% of the vote, as did the odd pairing of Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish and running mate Sansa Stark. Baelish-Stark took a slight lead in the first two weeks of the election, during which the vast majority of the votes were registered. Had HBO flipped that ticket -- which, given the outcome of Season 6, seems more realistic -- fan favorite Sansa may well have won.
Once again, she's been given short shrift.
Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and terrorist mastermind Cersei Lannister, paired with the Spymaster and amateur Frankenstein known as Qyburn, garnered just 2% of the vote, making her the Jill Stein of King's Landing. There is no wine goblet in Westeros large enough to obscure the size of that defeat.
Shame!
The vote could settle the age-old debate about which character is more popular with Thrones fans, Jon or Dany. With dragons at her back and the beloved Imp at her side, it's hard to imagine what else the Breaker of Chains could have done.
Then again, it's more likely to be remembered as an object lesson in the main problem with first-past-the-post voting.
If the 'Game of Thrones' election had used a more sophisticated system, giving voters the opportunity to rank candidates in order of preference, the outcome might have looked much different. Enough Baelish voters might have preferred Daenerys to Jon to change the final result.
Regardless, maybe the show is about to heal the serious division in fandom by uniting the Dragon Queen and the mopey Northerner. Given that Season 6 revealed that they are in fact both Targaryens, it seems a fitting ending.
Topics Game Of Thrones
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
