I don't believe you can win AI (or be the runner up) on casual votes, I think you need people who voted like I did. How else would you get in the tens of millions of votes? If people are not committed to someone, they just wouldn't care enough to vote.
Oh, I think for sure that Kris has fans, I think it's really the nature of the fans that's different. Kris IMHO got a lot of votes from the end of the season viewers who on the whole aren't as active on the fansites (hee! In my theory anyway). I couldn't count the number of people I saw mention Heartless randomly. He impressed the hell out of them. Plus I think he also had the heavy voting fans - he had a really active fan site during the show in Kris Allen Nation which I think helped him a lot. But then that closed up shop which might have created a vacuumn.
And I think in a lot of cases because his profile is so low (like you said above) they really don't know too much about his album. This is only a vague theory mind you and there are a lot of factors but I do think this is one of them.
I think 19 probably noticed that yes the traffic on Adam's official site is way higher than Kris's. When they posted numers on the site, Adam ususally had a about a 1000 people and Kris had maybe 50-60. Kris's fans tend to not obsess too much (in general) on the colour of his shirt or if he had his hair up or down, or if he said baby or woman, so yes, I think that was a factor.
Then there's just Adam's natural flair for drama, and his "story" which attracted magazine covers, and interviews like bees to honey. While Kris's natural tendency is to lie low and be more than happy to do so.
Why did I write so much??? Arrrgh.
LOL! Me too.