Idolator’s 2015 Readers’ Poll Best Album Results: What An Iconic Disaster THAT Turned Out To Be

Oh, stans — your passion; your commitment; your drama.

We first launched our annual readers’ poll for the best albums of the year in 2012, to coincide with the presidential election. “Barack Obama has emerged victorious in his second run for Commander In Chief,” we wrote at the time. “But as far as we’re concerned, you, our pop-loving readers, have one more important poll to hit — our own one, for the Best Albums Of 2012!” Adam Lambert‘s Trespassing was the clear winner that year.

Since then, the readers’ poll has been a fun and festive highlight in our year end coverage…well, until this year, when The Great Stan War Of 2015 scorched the land, obliterated the system and threw the corpse of fairness into a plastic tub filled with hooker heads, cockroaches and thumbtacks. NAUGHTY STANS!

Basically, things went fairly smoothly with the first of the two polls, which presented albums released between January and June of this year to vote for. Adam Lambert was in the lead at that point, with Carly Rae Jepsen in the runner-up position. Alas, things went batshit with the second of the two polls, as it became apparent bots or some form of vote-rigging program was employed to start boosting Enya‘s Dark Sky Island, which was literally jumping tens of thousands of votes per hour until we decided to pull that selection from the poll altogether, lest Pentatonix‘s fans go into cardiac arrest.

“What the hell is going on! IDOLATOR Just cancel the poll!!” shrieked one PTX loyalist in the comments. Another lamented, “Exactly, even if they try to fix it now, the votes will still be unfair. Upsets me too that Idolator isn’t even doing anything to fix the bots anymore.”

Children, take a seat. And Cher, take the wheel.

Now, we were going to average out what Enya’s number would have looked like if the fuckery hadn’t been employed, but then Justin Bieber’s Purpose starting leaping up the ranks just as incredibly, no doubt thanks to the same bot-ulism. SO SCREW IT! YOU’RE ALL PRETTY!

That said, here’s how things would have wound up, if if we had just done this all at face value and ignored the flopdom that went down:

1. Enya, Dark Sky Island — 8,973,280,493 votes* (*not really, but basically) 2. Justin Bieber, Purpose  — 253,884 3. Pentatonix, Pentatonix — 247,277 4. Adam Lambert, The Original High — 146,532 5. Carly Rae Jepsen, Emotion — 129,056 6. Marina And The Diamonds, Froot — 22,931 7. Janet Jackson, Unbreakable — 15,081 8. Melanie Martinez, Cry Baby — 14,769 9. Hilary Duff, Breathe In. Breathe Out — 10,094 10. Miley Cyrus, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz — 5,017

God bless #Democracy!