If you watch much American Reality TV you find that there are a large portion of people who vote for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. Marie making the finals is not surprising based on how voting has gone for any number of shows.

We even have websites devoted to determining which talentless hack will be voted for for some of the shows. It is hard to know if it has much effect, but when the talentless are appealing for some other reason it does seem to help keep someone around a lot longer than they otherwise would.

Even without that personality often carries people farther than their talent will.

America is perverse like that.

For the show So You Think You Can Dance they let America pick the bottom three and do a dance off for the first half of the season. The advantage is that lets those with talent who haven't yet connected with the audience a chance to stay in over those who just aren't that good. The top half are done all by votes only, but it does seem to weed out most of those that have no chance to win early in the season.

In the US they did change the judges scoring and vote total equation for DWTS to give more weight to the judges score than the original system allowed and that helps some.

When someone has a huge fan base coming into the show sometimes it is hard to overcome that, but at least the change in scoring does help ensure that popularity alone won't get you the win.