American Idol’s Final Voting Process: Fair or Flawed?

I may not be able to tell you right now who will win American Idol tonight, but there is one thing I can tell you: Ryan Seacrest will talk about how close the vote was between Clay and Ruben. It will be less than 2%, I bet. Perhaps even a smaller margin than that.

Phone lines for both contestants were absolutely overwhelmed last night. We have gotten tons of e-mails from people who were trying to vote and couldn’t, or got just a few votes in over three hours. Personally, I could not register a single vote in my sporadic attempts throughout the three-hour period.

And herein lies a problem.

I touched on this in my article looking at Tuesday night’s show, but think I need to expand on it a bit more here. Basically, the situation is this: Fox did not open up enough phone line capacity to truly measure America’s vote. If the phone lines were jam packed for both of them throughout the entire three-hour period, how on earth can we measure which had more votes? We have used up the entire capacity. If the phone lines can only accept, say, five million calls per number per hour, then we are going to find out that both Ruben and Clay received 15 million votes each. The only difference might be in whether people stayed on the line a fraction of a second longer to hear for sure that their vote was registered properly. Even that should even out over a random situation like this – unless the more experienced callers knew to hang up quickly so the next call could get through.

But wait, there is one other way to register your vote – AT&T text messaging. I’m no text messaging expert, but it seems to me that these votes would go along more smoothly, meaning there is a better chance to have your vote registered. Early in this series, I wondered (just to myself, not in an article) why anybody in their right mind would use text message voting instead of a free phone call. Now I know. Indeed, it would not surprise me at all to find out that text messaging makes the difference in who is selected as the American Idol. It will be interesting to see if Ryan Seacrest trumpets AT&T for making such a difference or if they keep it quiet as they generally tend to do when it comes to specifics about voting results.

But that aside, the real way to determine the true winner would have been for Fox to analyze the voting from the final three and realize that they needed more capacity – a lot more. They should have opened up enough capacity to truly get a representative vote, meaning the phone lines were not overwhelmed for the entire three hours. Sure, that would have meant spending a bit more on the toll-free lines, but I’m pretty sure they’re making quite enough to cover it.

Meanwhile, one way to truly measure popularity is through the pre-orders for singles on Amazon.com (and elsewhere, but Amazon is pretty representative, I think). I noted in a previous article that pre-orders done through links on RealityNewsOnline and Foxes On Idol were running at a nine-to-one ratio for Clay. With new data in, that ratio has become even more lopsided for Clay. The ratio now stands at over twelve-to-one! Meanwhile, on Amazon.com overall, Clay remains at #1 on their purchase rankings, while Ruben has moved up, but still resides only at #17.

Fans are voting with their wallets, and those votes are leaning heavily towards Clay. We’ll have to see tonight if the voting system used by the show reflects this same trend.

If you haven’t ordered your copy of either single yet, now is your chance:

Clay’s Single: “This Is The Night/On The Wings Of Love”

Ruben’s Single: “Flying Without Wings/Superstar”

David Bloomberg is the Editor of Foxes On Idol, and can be reached at rno@pobox.com.

Be sure to sign up for the RealityNewsOnline/FoxesOnIdol e-mail update so you can stay informed about new articles on both sites! For all of the RealityNewsOnline articles about this show, check out the American Idol page.