Thanks...you always have good links.
I personally don't think that website and any others like it could swing the votes as much as they claim. AI says it's been receiving over 35,000,000 million votes (obviously not necessarily from 35,000,000 individuals). Dividing 35 million equally among the top six finalists produces 5,833,333 per contestant.
AI has never released the weekly totals or percentages for any contestant. But the percentages are what would help everyone understand all this better.
For example, the most recent AOL polls on the last six AI contestants had Bo and Carrie at 35% each. If that's really how the actual vote totals break down, that's 70% between just two contestants -- or 30% (10.5 mil based on a total of 35 mil) unequally divided among the bottom four people.
Understood in this way, a relatively few votes easily could separate the bottom two each week -- perhaps as litte as a few hundred or a few thousand. The spread between the bottom contestants might be as little as a fraction of one percent of the total votes cast each week, and certainly is not much greater than a couple of percentage points.
The differences at the bottom easily are explainable as the result of random weekly swings in the number of fans for a given contestant who were able to get through on the phone lines. The fact that many people vote for more than one candidate each week -- and vote multiple times each week -- further complicates the picture.
I think as each week goes by the vftw site will have less impact.