Quote:
Originally posted by RedefinedDiva
There has been a massive outcry of Clay being the "real" winner of AI.
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I just want to explain why this is, to anybody else who hasn't discussed this yet:
The Fox phone lines were only open for three hours, which Fox knew from experience wouldn't be nearly long enough to cover the massive amounts of calls coming in. Let's say (I'm totally making up this number up) each phone line was able to handle 10 million calls per hour. Let's say 11 million people per hour were calling for Clay and 20 million people per hour were calling for Ruben (or vice versa). Either way, each phone number will only be able to handle 10 million calls an hour, meaning each contestant will get almost identical numbers of votes. Also, it would be extremely easy for Fox to rig the contest by simply keeping "their" contestant's phone lines open a couple minutes longer, which isn't something that anybody else would notice. In fact, I believe that when the votes were finally counted, the difference in votes amount to
one minute's worth of calls.
Obviously, since Fox knew this would happen (the phone lines were also flooded in the second-to-last round, too) but didn't increase the phone lines' capacity, you can reasonably assume that Fox was trying to engineer a very close vote tally (if not rig the contest altogether -- although there's no hard evidence that that was the case and probably never will be). I think this is the reason that too many people are claiming that Ruben isn't the "real" winner -- the voting system was too flawed to give an accurate reading as to who the public really preferred.
(I'm not trying to be dismissive of Ruben here; the only episode I watched of American Idol was the last and I liked Ruben and Clay equally. I'm just trying to point out why a lot of people have been claiming the vote wasn't necessarily accurate, whether or not they're right.)