Children have elected President Barack Obama to a second term, in Nickelodeon’s 2012 Kids Pick the President voting.

The youngsters of the United States have voted, the results are in and it’s a landslide victory for Barack Obama.

Since this franchise began in 1988, kids have correctly picked the POTUS (in advance of the national election) five out of the last six elections.

More than half a million votes were cast in the network’s online poll this time around. President Obama received 65% of the vote and former Governor Mitt Romney received 35%, Nickelodeon reported.

In grown-up surveys, Obama and Romney have been running neck and neck.

“Obama won big,” said children’s current affairs show “Nick News” with anchor Linda Ellerbee, who doubted that Romney’s failure to join Obama in a “Nick News” election special a week ago on the Nickelodeon cable channel might have swayed the outcome.

“In 2004, when John Kerry refused to participate in the show, the kids still elected Kerry,” who went on to suffer defeat at the hands of George W. Bush, she told AFP.

Four years ago, a much bigger, franchise record, 2.2 million votes were cast in what Nickelodeon notes is not a scientific poll; Sen. Barack Obama was declared the winner, with 51 percent of the vote to Sen. John McCain’s 49 percent.

Voting was down because this year, for the first time, Nickelodeon limited voting to one vote per electronic device, in order to “more closely replicate the actual election, and to ensure the results were more authentic,” though kids were able to cast their votes online from Oct. 15-22.

We won’t know for a couple weeks if this “more authentic” methodology gummed up Nickelodeon’s near-perfect predicting record.

The special has come to loom large-ish because in some circles (gambling ones, for instance) it’s become a kind of bellweather poll.

There’s also no telling how voting might have been affected by Romney’s decision to decline to participate in the accompanying “Kids Pick the President” TV special.

Romney declined to participate by sitting down to be taped answering kids’ questions.

“It’s important to take note of who won the ‘Kids’ Vote,’ simply because so many kids vote the way their parents will,” Linda Ellerbee, the executive producer and also the special’s host, said back in ’08.

More than 521,000 votes were cast over the past week, Ellerbee said, a significant reduction in turnout “because Nickelodeon fixed it this time so you couldn’t vote more than once.”

And while there was no way to guarantee that everyone who voted was under the legal voting age of 18, “it’s safe to say the majority are kids,” based on anecdotal evidence from previous years, she said.

Launched 21 years ago, “Nick News” is the longest-running children’s news program in television history.

Sources and Citations from Washington Post | Nick News

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