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Was Clay Robbed?by David Bloomberg -- 05/22/2003
View Printable version of this article By now you've seen the finale, you've read Sting7's recap, and you know what happened. Over here at RealityNewsOnline/Foxes On Idol Headquarters, the e-mail is already coming in - "Clay was robbed!" Certainly, it's not surprising to see Clay's fans saying this. But do they have a point? My answer - maybe. Before the results were announced, I wrote an article, American Idol's Final Voting Process: Fair or Flawed?, that looked at whether we would truly get an honest result from the show. In that article, I noted that with the phone lines so completely filled up, there was no real way to get an actual vote total that would make any sense. That prediction came true with a ridiculously small margin between Clay and Ruben Wednesday night. And it was made even worse by stories that text messaging was not working properly and reports that there had been an "anomaly" in the voting procedures. Now add to this the fact that Ryan Seacrest never did get the numbers right. Early in the show, he said one of the contestants received 50.28% of the vote and the other got 49.72%. He said there were some 24 million votes. He also said the difference was about 13,000 votes. I didn't do the math at the time, but that just doesn't work out. Later, as he was about to announce Ruben as the winner, he claimed there had been a mess-up and the actual vote difference was "just over" 1335! But when he said it, he prefaced it by saying the vote was "still" close. Why would he need to put such a qualifier on it when the total he read was even closer? And why would it be "just over" a number that goes all the way down to the single digits? Because he got it wrong, that's why. If in fact the difference had been 1335 out of 24 million, the percentage difference would have been 0.0056%. Ruben would have had 50.0056% of the vote to Clay's 49.9944%. But that doesn't go along with what Ryan said earlier. However, doing the math and using the percentages he gave early in the show, figuring in the 24 million votes, it comes to a difference of 134,400. It looks like Ryan screwed it up. He meant "just over" 133,500 and said 1335 instead. I guess he didn't need to do well on his math SATs to get this gig. Why am I spending so much time with this? Because it is yet another brick that will be used to build a conspiracy theory. If they couldn't even properly tell us the vote count, how can we believe them? Add this to everything else that Clay fans think regarding a conspiracy - most of which were listed in Andrea Shuman's column a few days ago - and fans will have plenty to argue about for months to come. Do I, personally, believe it was a conspiracy? No. Was I happy about the result? Well, I felt that Clay should have won, but I also feel that Ruben was deserving. If I were in charge and could have called it a tie, I would have. But am I critical of the way the voting was handled? Absolutely. That is where Clay fans have a potentially legitimate complaint. It's impossible to know if there are more Clay fans, if those fans are more dedicated, if they would have been willing to dial until their fingers were bloody. Nobody really knows who should have won because the voting system did not properly allow it. Had Clay won, Ruben fans would have had the same complaints. It comes down to this: Fox needs to fix its voting system. There have been many suggestions along the way, and I'm not going to go into them here. We'll have plenty of time to discuss that later. But the way it was done for the final two (and some say the final three, even) was, quite simply, flawed. It produced a result that gave us a winner but left us worrying about the telephone or text message equivalent of hanging chads. I half expect somebody to demand a recount in Florida. Worst of all, it means that while we should be celebrating the new American Idol, we are left arguing about whether he should have won at all. And that really isn't fair to Ruben. So was Clay robbed? Maybe. But whether he has the title of "American Idol" or not, he will be treated almost like the winner by the public, and definitely by his fans. Ruben takes the crown and it's impossible to look at his smiling, dimpled face without being happy for him. Both of them have music careers in their future, and nobody can "rob" them of that. 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. For more news about reality TV, be sure to check SirLinksALot! View Printable version of this article
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