Kris Allen (Getty)
Last week, I suggested that television's "American Idol" singing competition is an election contest that, in form and style,
most closely resembles an old-style Southern primary, in which finishing second in the first round of balloting often led to victory in a runoff election.
I noted that this typically worked because the bulk of votes for the eliminated third-place finisher ended up going to the second-place finisher, allowing him to leap-frog over the front-runner to victory. I used that model to correctly predict the upset victory by Kris Allen over Adam Lambert in the American Idol finals.
But even I had no idea just how appropriate that model was. Because now we can add to the tale complaints from the losing side of vote-rigging and ballot-box-stuffing -- all of which took place not merely right under the noses of, but apparently with the connivance of, powerful entities associated with the show.
It seems one of the show's main sponsors, AT&T, sent representatives to two show-watching parties in Arkansas, Allen's home state. Armed with demo phones, they demonstrated for party attendees how to "power text" -- that is, how to send 10 or more text messages simultaneously.
Not surprisingly, attendees at the two Arkansas show-watching parties voted overwhelmingly for Allen.
No similar effort was undertaken by AT&T on behalf of Lambert.
Given the tens of millions of votes cast in a typical American Idol finale -- in last year's, for instance, 100 million votes were cast -- it's hardly likely that even the few thousand votes that could have been cast by party-goers aided by AT&T salesmen could have been enough to sway the outcome.
Unless, of course, the outcome was as close as Lyndon Johnson's 87-vote victory over Gov. Coke Stevenson in the 1948 Texas Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate -- an outcome forever clouded by allegations of ballot-box stuffing.
Somewhere, Coke Stevenson is rolling over in his grave.
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Comments
Could it be that the good folks in Arkansas are not quite as backwards as the guy-lined, nail polished folks in SoCa may think they are? The same good ol' boys who brought you the world's greatest retail distribution chain now bring you the American Idol of 2009!
Posted by: Rich
| May 27, 2009 12:00 PM
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