How in tune are voters?

When the first Grammy Awards were handed out in 1959, the ballot was a single sheet of paper, folded twice and mailed to voters in a standard envelope.

Today, “it’s as big as the phone book for White Plains, [N.Y.],” jokes Dom Cerulli, a charter member of the Recording Academy, which launched the Grammy Awards as the music industry’s answer to the Oscars.

The reason: back then there were just 28 categories. This year, 105. And consider: 200 musicians, producers and others voted for the freshman Grammy; now the academy has 13,000 eligible voters.

Who are all these voters? And do they really know the difference between the White Stripes’ “Elephant” and Black Eyed Peas’ “Elephunk” albums, and between Evanescence’s album “Fallen” and Sarah McLachlan’s song “Fallen”?

Fans as well as pop critics may well wonder whether a cellist who played on a Mantovani album in 1963 or a scribe who wrote liner notes for Perry Como and Johnny Mathis albums in 1959 ought to be deciding whether OutKast or Eminem deserves the record of the year award this time around.

In practice, many veteran voters do feel alienated by trends in pop music and simply bow out from the main categories, saving their votes for those that still pique their interest. Others pride themselves on keeping up with pop and continue to weigh in via their Grammy ballots.

“I used to carefully pick all the categories I knew about and voted in the maximum number,” says musician David Blume, a voter since the late ‘60s. “As time went by, that number got fewer and fewer, and now I’ve found I only vote in the folk, jazz and, say, arranging categories. Those are things I know something about.”

The proliferation of specialty fields and categories -- from polka and remixed recording to Southern, country or bluegrass gospel album -- that results in the handing out of hundreds of Grammys each year has opened the process to criticism, as has the dramatic increase in membership.

Last year Warner Bros. Records was accused of trying to pad membership by allowing employees to sing on a benefit album, giving them the professional credits required to secure voting privileges.

“Or so they thought,” Recording Academy president Neil Portnow said. “It would be highly unlikely for that to be able to happen in the future. I communicated with all the label presidents ... that they don’t have to try to play that silly game.”

Still, because of the membership drive the academy launched in the 1990s to diversify the voter pool, it has become statistically far less likely that any attempt at ballot-box stuffing could swing the results.

Some voters bemoan the disappearance of listening parties that allowed members to audition all nominated tracks in various categories. Others complain that record companies don’t supply voters with nominated recordings, the way film distributors send videos of nominated movies to Academy Award voters.

But Portnow said the academy is planning to make nominated recordings available for voters to hear online “in the very near future.”

Of the academy’s total membership of 18,000, lifetime voting privileges are reserved for those with credits on at least six commercially released tracks.

Initially those voters get a massive list of recordings eligible for nomination, because any academy member or any record or music video company registered with the academy’s awards department may enter a recording for Grammy consideration. The first-round list of nominees for album and record of the year alone may have as many as 1,000 titles apiece, from which the five finalists eventually emerge.

Entries are screened to make sure they’re actually eligible; those that are show up on the first-round ballot. The results are examined by another screening committee put in place in recent years to weed out any potentially embarrassing situations (such as British progressive rock group Jethro Tull’s 1988 win for best hard rock/metal performance, or lip-syncing duo Milli Vanilli’s crowning as 1989’s best new artist).

Once finalists have been selected, all eligible members may vote for record, album, song and new artist, but are then limited to making selections in eight specialty fields, such as country, classical, jazz or R&B.;

The idea is that limiting the number of fields open to voters encourages them to target areas in which they have some degree of expertise. Even so, because many individual fields have multiple categories (country male and female vocals; country song, album, duo or group vocals; etc.), many voters still wind up casting dozens of votes.

“If you had to choose from [an even] smaller number of fields, you’d be more serious about it -- not that people aren’t, but there’s more chance for a flippant choice” the way things are now, says producer Saul Davis, whose wife, musician-producer Carla Olson, is a Grammy voter.