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Over the course of the next exciting (if you enjoy college basketball / annoying if you don't) month, some 70 million Final Four brackets will be filled out, according to estimates from the American Gaming Association. Seventy million! That's 22 percent of the population of the United States, and, as the AGA gleefully notes, it is a figure "greater than the number of ballots cast for either President Obama (66 million) or Mitt Romney (61 million) in the 2012 election." In fact, it's more than the number of ballots cast for any presidential candidate in history -- much less any other office since the nation was founded.

However, we are comparing not only apples and oranges on this; we are comparing space debris and flower petals. Democracy is still more popular than gambling. For now. In a sense.

Yes, 70 million is greater than the number of people who voted for Obama or Romney in 2012. But it is just about equal to the number of votes cast for Obama in his 2008 landslide. There's not a lot of wiggle room in the AGA's estimate, either: That year, Obama got 69.5 million votes.

But also? That was from a pool of 131 million votes, which is a better comparison. After all, comparing total ballots (in the case of the basketball brackets) with votes received (in the Obama/Romney example) doesn't match up. Now, if all 70 million of those brackets had, say, Ohio State winning the tournament, then we've got a contest. In 2008, there were 131.5 million votes cast, nearly double the number of brackets that might be filled out this year.

Another point. The AGA estimates that people will, on average, fill out two brackets. Which, of course, is not how our democracy works. When voting for president, you get one vote. If you got more than one, it's pretty clear that Romney and Obama would each have gotten far more than 70 million votes. (If you want to share your conspiracy theories about how voter fraud influenced the 2012 elections, feel free to do so on Twitter.) Only about 40 million people will actually fill out a bracket -- Bob-Dole-in-1996 levels of support.

There has been a push in some places (including Los Angeles) to offer a similar reward for voting as you can receive from filling out a bracket: pride in doing your civic duty money. Clearly, most people are filling out brackets not because they have any idea how Marquette stacks up against Belmont but because they get $50 if they have better guesses than their co-workers.* LA's theory is that if you treat a ballot like a lottery ticket, there will be even more ballots cast.

The AGA's real goal, of course, is to get us talking about the AGA and gambling, so nice work. But the good news for everyone else is that the AGA appears to be somewhat iffy on math. So if you see them at the casino, sit at their table. You should do pretty well.

* Gambling is illegal in a lot of places, and no one does it of course, hahaha, right? Right.

Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He is based in New York City.

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The Fix: Democracy: Still slightly more popular than college basketball!