A disclaimer upfront: I don’t watch American Idol. I only see little snippets of the show on other TV programs, which is where I learned, involuntarily, about the incredibly close ballot last week to determine which of the three finalists would be booted back to obscurity.
This morning, thanks to Andrew Tobias, we learn that the balloting may not have been that close after all. Commenter M.I.T. Howard explains:
The whole country has just been subject to voting fraud (well maybe only the half who care). Yes, last week’s American Idol vote tallies were meaningless. Remember the percentages for the three finalists: 33.68%, 33.26%, 33.06% Was America really this closely divided? Unlikely. The close percentages are a tribute to the quality of the phone system. The phone lines for all 3 candidates were saturated! The lines were open for a fixed period of time and the pipeline of people voting was enough to saturate the system. The phone system did a marvelous job of accepting almost identical vote tallies for each candidate. Now that’s good engineering.
Makes sense to me.
Ed Bott 