Can’t figure out where the hell the post I did with totals for % of voters to vote for #1 and #2 albums in the 90’s and 00’s is, but I did find this one, which started it:

This year [2010] [2009, woops, forgot about Kanye last year], the #1 album was only on 22% of P&J ballots, while the second-place one was on 20%. A truly huge album of the last decade would pull in over 40% of voters — still not “consensus” technically but an awful lot closer than less than a quarter. I think the story to take away might be that, like in the pop charts, the ceiling is also falling on big-picture critic polling, so that you don’t need as many votes to be on top as you used to. Which itself diminishes the import of being #1, to some degree, and part of the anxiety here — to the extent that there is some — may have to do with the fact that the #1’s don’t “feel” #1, regardless of whether we think they’re best or not. (This doesn’t answer the question of whether anything that wasn’t indie “felt” #1 either — I would argue that there isn’t anything like it this year.)

Tune-Yards got 19.3% of voters this year, with runner-up PJ Harvey getting 18.4%. So continued shrinking of number of people voting for #1 and also shrinking gap between #1 and #2. That might just mean that the polls are getting more unpredictable, which is fine by me.