I’ve long commented offline on how silly it is for local political boundaries to be constantly redrawn to mark the start of the Electoral process, thus negating any and all preparation by opposition political parties should the area they were canvassing suddenly become part of a PAP stronghold like Marine Parade or Tanjong Pagar. So naturally, I was glad to be proven wrong when this year’s General Elections went ahead with minimal changes to the political map. It gave me a fair amount of hope that maybe Singaporeans would be given more reason to exercise their vote.

Until Singapore Idol came along, of course.

Up until the Wildcard participants were announced last night, I was under the impression that the contestants with the third and fourth highest number of votes each week would be automatically shunted to the Wildcard round. This made the most sense to me. They had already proven themselves and Singapore voted for them. The Wildcard round would be for them to raise the stakes and compete to see who the most popular two were. Already, I knew who I had in mind. Terence Tay and Gayle Nerva. Two people whom I felt were unjustly left out of the Top 12.

So you can imagine my disbelief when I discovered that the Wildcard participants turned out to be picked by the judges based on standards unknown to the general public. It was only then that I remembered that this was the standard from the Idol franchise. The Wildcard round was filled with people whom the judges felt deserved to be in the Top 12. “Deserved”? Instead of 3rd placed Terence Tay, they only picked Norman Then from the first week. Nothing against Norman, of course, but if you were only going to pick one from a VERY lopsided bunch of contestants… then Terence should have been it. And why only one? Instead, the judges picked five girls and only three guys to round out the Wildcard round.

And *sigh* Geraldine is one of them. What an absolute waste of space.

Not to mention that apparently due to some technical glitch, Mathilda is NOT the top voted contestant from last night. In fact, she’s not even in the top two. The best female pure singer I have ever heard from Singapore Idol was not even voted into the top two. Now she has to compete again for her spot, which shouldn’t be much of a problem, I guess.

So doctored voting system aside, here are my predictions for the Wildcard round, in order of preference: Gayle, Mathilda, Jay and (for lack of a better choice) Siew Woon. The first three are obvious picks. They’ve more than proven themselves and should very well have been in the Top 2 for their respective rounds. Siew Woon, because she was let down by song choice and should be given a second chance to prove her worth.

The rest, Geraldine, Norman, Primero and Meryl should be humbled that they got this far and be thankful to their fans for voting them. But do they deserve to go further? Hell no.