Wii owners who turned on their systems yesterday may have gotten a big surprise: the announcement from Nintendo that a new Wii channel, the Everybody Votes Channel, is available now for download.

Nintendo sent the following e-mail to Wii owners:

What wish would you ask a genie to grant? Health or Wealth?

You can download the Everybody Votes Channel free of charge from the Wii Shop Channel now. But before you can use the channel, you need to perform a Wii System Update.

The system update in question adds in a region feature to your Wii, which is required for the Everybody Votes Channel. After downloading and accessing the channel, Wii owners will need to set and confirm their region. After that, the channel moves into registration mode, allowing the user to register up to 10 Miis that can be used for voting.

To vote, select a poll, then using A and B, drag a Mii over to the preferred response. It's that easy. Wii owners can also predict which answer they think will win. Each poll has a set length of time it will be open, as displayed in the top right corner of each poll on the Everybody Votes Channel main menu.

The channel's layout contains four circular buttons: Active Polls, Worldwide Polls, Recent Results, and Poll History. The first two show which polls are active, while Recent Results and Poll History are self-descriptive.

Across the top are five more options: Register New Voter, Voter Data, Suggest A Question, Options, and Wii Menu. Under Options are the choices of Confirm Polling Region, Erase All Data, and Change Question Language. For Suggest a Question, Wii owners can type a question and two answers to pick from, and then send the question to Nintendo for possible use in the future.

Voter Data offers three pages of info on each voter. The first contains a Vote Count, Prediction Record and Prediction Accuracy. The second tells voter "how tuned in" they are, and the third shows their distance from the popular opinion.

The Everybody Votes Channel is currently available as a free download on the Wii Shop Channel under Wii Ware, as is the Internet Channel Beta Version.