The votes were rigged last week. . . . They don’t want the Final Five to be all-female. Haley is almost as popular as Sanjaya, and is the only cute rural white girl-next-door type with nice legs. Haley and Sanjaya bring in the viewers.
He was just 17 and he looked even younger. Russian women have fuller mustaches.
His hair was unlike anything we’d ever seen.
He made the girls cry, and the ladies swoon.
He had a name you couldn’t forget.
And when he sang—
Well, when he sang, hell had a name.
Dogs whimpered in put-me-out-of-my-misery agony, window-panes shattered, and music lovers the world over winced as if they had just bitten their own tongues while eating a bad potato chip.
They called him Sanjaya, and for a glorious multiweek stretch in spring 2007, he threatened to bring down the juggernaut known as American Idol. For if the talent-free Sanjaya could win the big prize, what was the point of watching this show?
It was one thing for the magnificently talented Jennifer Hudson to get booted from the show a bit prematurely, or for the barely adequate Nikki McKibbin to survive longer than the gifted Tamyra Gray—but if a tone-deaf national joke with less vocal ability than the winner of the Tuesday Night Karaoke Contest & Chicken Buffet at your local neighborhood tavern was crowned the next big thing in pop music, American Idol would lose even the pretense of credibility.
Yet week after week, Sanjaya survived.
Was it shock jock Howard Stern, urging his army of listeners to vote for Sanjaya with all their technical might? Was it the subversive “Vote for the Worst” Web site, which encouraged fans to screw with the process by casting votes for the least talented finalist?
Or was it something darker? Could it be the American Idol producers wanted Sanjaya around and were jimmying the result, as the aforementioned “Ed” asserted on the Reality TV Web site?
In the first half of the first decade of the 21st century, the biggest phenomenon in all of television wasn’t The Sopranos or Lost or 24 or Desperate Housewives, nor was it an adventure reality show such as Survivor or The Amazing Race. It was a glorified talent contest called American Idol, which was really nothing more than an updated version of the hokey old Star Search show, with amateurs competing to become instant celebrities. (Decades before Star Search, there were programs such as Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour on TV, and even before that, amateur talent contests on radio. They probably had an Amateur Hour during the Middle Ages.)
Literally tens of millions of viewers tuned in every week to see a group of moderately talented amateur singers belt out cover versions of middle-of-the-road hits, usually from the 1960s and 1970s. They didn’t even have a live band on the tacky stage most of the time, for crying out loud. Everybody sang along to recorded music tracks.
From this cheesiness sprang a phenomenon. Ryan Seacrest was crowned the next Dick Clark. (In the meantime, Seacrest’s cohost from season 1 of American Idol, one Brian Dunkleman, seemed to spend the next several years in the same showbiz limbo that had claimed the likes of McLean Stevenson and Shelley Long in years gone by.) Simon Cowell became one of the most famous and highly paid personalities in the world. Randy Jackson’s witless and repetitive “Yo Dawg” became a national catch phrase. The entertainment shows and magazines breathlessly chronicled Paula Abdul’s fragile wackiness. Paula even got a reality show of her own.
Most astonishing of all, many AI winners—and even some also-rans—became genuine music stars, on a par with the biggest names in pop music. Kelly Clarkson, Clay Aiken, Carrie Underwood, and Chris Daughtry segued from talent show contestants to legitimate, award-winning, platinum-selling artists. Jennifer Hudson won an Academy Award for best supporting actress in the musical Dreamgirls. Fantasia Barrino starred in The Color Purple on Broadway.
Other winners and finalists were quickly forgotten and turned bitter. There were more than a few scandals involving criminal or lascivious behavior on the part of some finalists, not to mention the allegations by one contestant that he’d slept with Paula. But none of these setbacks made a dent in the AI juggernaut.
The only real and ongoing threat to the show’s success: the dogged rumors that the voting was rigged.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe the voting process on American Idol is flawed. That’s because it is flawed.
First and most problematic, you can vote as often as the technology allows. In fact, they want you to vote as often as you can, because every call and every text message is another “ka-ching!” for the cash register. If they limited it to one vote per viewer, it would be more expensive to ensure the rules were followed—and less profitable. That’s not going to happen.
But when you open the phone lines to an entire nation for a two-hour period (staggered across time zones), you’re also opening your voting process to myriad technical headaches.
First, not all the votes get counted. Even if 30 million votes get through, untold millions of other potential votes are thwarted by busy signals. Luck is a huge factor.
So is techno-expertise. Whereas a potential phone call will die with a busy signal—you have to dial again to get through—text messages line up one behind the other, like motorists at the DMV. It may take a while for you to reach the finish line, but you will get there. In addition, the very process of text messaging takes up much less “space” on a phone line, so it’s easier to get through. What this means is text messaging has the advantage over old-fashioned dialing.
Unless, that is, you’re using computerized auto-dialing devices, capable of casting hundreds of votes in the time it would take a human dialer to get through just once. Just a few hundred of these so-called phone phreakers can tilt the vote—especially if it’s a particularly close finale, as in season 2, when Ruben Studdard clipped Clay Aiken by less than 1 percent of the vote.
American Idol producers say they have safeguards in place to detect phone phreaking, but there’s software out there that supposedly enables the phone phreakers to dodge those barricades. So it goes in the world of hacking and attacking. Just when you come up with a tamperproof system, some rascal-genius figures out a way around it. If all the hackers in the world put their brainpower to more important causes, they probably could have solved global warming by now.
“Can ‘American Idol’ Voting Be Fixed?” was the headline on a story on the Associated Content Web site in 2007. Kari Livingston wrote:
It happens every season. One contestant is voted off or banished to the bottom two while the country gasps in shock. In season one Tamyra Gray was ousted while Nikki McKibbin was sent back to safety. In the second season, Joshua Gracin was safe after a terrible performance while mini-diva Trenyce received a one-way ticket home to Memphis. Jennifer Hudson was the sixth to go in season three, while red-headed crooner John Stevens lived to warble another week. In season four, inexplicable heartthrob Constantine Maroulis was booted off before Scott Savol, and in the shocker of all shockers, fan favorite Chris Daughtry finished in fourth place when many fans expected him to win it all.
The article details past snafus, including a power outage in Chicago that prevented Jennifer Hudson’s hometown fans from voting for her, and the claim from thousands of Daughtry fans that when they voted for their man, they heard Katherine McPhee’s voice thanking them for their vote.
An online petition calls for changes in the system.
Instead of being a talent contest ... it has turned into “which fan base can cheat through their votes faster.” It has surfaced that there are different Internet programs that will allow you to get in thousands of votes, change your time zone so you can vote for triple the amount of time ... there are also ways to get thousands of votes through [via] text messaging. Your disclaimer claims that power voting is not allowed and those votes will be thrown out, however it is very difficult to determine these methods by which the power voting occurs….
There should be a limit of five votes per phone number and 10 text messages per phone number.... There will always be those who feel the need to cheat or exploit the system but this could cut down on that dramatically....
In fact, some televised talent shows do limit the number of calls and texts—but don’t hold your breath waiting for American Idol to follow suit. If it did so at this juncture, some conspiracy theorists would point to the change as proof that the votes were manipulated in the past.
AI fan sites are filled with complaints from viewers who say that no matter how often they try, they can never get through. Is this bad luck, or are darker forces at work?
A DVD titled American Idol Unauthorized makes the very wobbly claim that the producers of the show decide who’s going to win—and then jam the phone lines to ensure their choices come out on top. There are lots of interviews with disgruntled former contestants, such as the weasely Corey Clark, who allegedly had an affair with Paula Abdul.
“The voting system is rigged up!” says Corey, who then offers no proof of his claim.
We also hear from “experts” including former contestants on Fear Factor and Survivor, a Beverly Hills “media psychiatrist,” and the guy who plays Ari’s flamboyant assistant Lloyd on Entourage. I’m not kidding. They don’t make claims that the show is being rigged; they’re just on the DVD because—well, there’s no good reason for them to be there.
American Idol Unauthorized is filled with damning statements— one magazine editor flat out says that the show is rigged and everyone knows it—but there’s not one piece of hard evidence on the DVD.
It would be hard to dispute the argument that the efforts of Howard Stern and the “Vote for the Worst” campaign resulted in thousands if not millions of votes for the talent-impaired Sanjaya. But let’s not discount the kid’s popularity with the little girls, the suburban moms, and the show tune-loving folks who make up a huge portion of the AI fan base. Lousy voice notwithstanding, Sanjaya was extremely viewer friendly. (His hair had more personality than he did, but still . . . )
It would also be impossible to dispute that the American Idol voting system is more flawed than Florida’s circa 2000 and that the most popular contestant won’t necessarily gather the most votes. The process is a giant and glorious mess, and it’s probably impossible to fix it at this point.
But does any of this mean the producers of the show are actually rigging the results? Hardly. Even with all the reports of voting snafus and technical glitches, of power voting and “Vote for the Worst” campaigns, there’s never been any evidence linking anyone at Fox with vote tampering.
Why would they? In season 6, American Idol was bringing in some 32 million viewers a week—more than 10 million viewers above the respective totals for such hits as CSI, Desperate Housewives, and Dancing with the Stars. The show is in a league of its own. Why would the producers risk millions upon millions of dollars on some kind of vote-rigging scheme when it really doesn’t matter who wins? (Unless it was Sanjaya.)
As long as the finalists include a mix of the gorgeous and the weight-challenged, various ethnic groups, hunky guys and cute girls, with the occasional oddball favorite, the viewers will be there. As long as we get the offstage dramas and the onstage tears, the standing ovations from the crowd and the snarky comments from Simon, the viewers will be there.
Even if the producers wanted to finesse the results, thereby risking international embarrassment, there’s no guarantee their choices would be any more appealing than the results we’re getting with an admittedly screwed-up system.
The voting process on American Idol is unarguably problematic. But just because something is flawed doesn’t mean somebody “fixed” it.