AT&T may have unfairly influenced American Idol vote

AT&T May Have Swayed ‘Idol’ Results [The New York Times]

Some American Idol fans are upset after learning that AT&T, one of the show's major corporate sponsors, may have given an unfair advantage to the winning contestant in this year's finale. The Times reports that AT&T, which is the only mobile provider that Idol viewers can use to text message votes for their favorite contestant, held two parties in the state of Arkansas the night of the final performance last week. The parties were organized to support the eventual winner, Kris Allen, an Arkansas native.

According to this article, AT&T did not organize any similar parties for the second place contestant, Adam Lambert.

At those parties, AT&T representatives brought demonstration phones with them to pass out to the supporters of Mr. Allen. The AT&T employees then went on to show party goers how to send "power text messages," which are essentially multiple copies of the same text message. The power texts copied the message 10 or more times and sent them to the Idol ballot box. As you can imagine, the ability to vote multiple times with one keystroke can have a dramatic effect on the contestant's chances. In fact, power texts appear to be prohibited by Idol's rules, which prohibit using "technical enhancements" to send multiple text messages.

I wondered about this when I started hearing about the "record breaking" voting that was coming in during the final weeks of the season.  Officials at FOX have announced that, regardless of any advantage that the AT&T parties may have given Allen, the result of the American Idol voting will stand.  But if you ask me, I think FOX needs to assure that, in the coming seasons, voting is fair and free of technical enhancements.  Failure to do so will risk the future of the most important ratings franchise currently on the broadcast network. 

Comments

[sineswiper]

The dirty little secret with American Idol's voting methods, at least in the phone world, is that the phone companies are not equipped to handle millions of calls in such a short period of time. Phone companies will automatically block certain numbers if the popularity of that number is too great for the phone switches to handle.

Since the contestants are tied to the numbers dialed, this means that certain contestants will be blocked from getting voted for a period of time (from that phone company). Sure, text messaging has eased this problem, but it still exists.

So, if you ask me, the vote is -already- rigged by technical limitations.