American Idol Gets the Numbers Wrong AGAIN!
After American Idol messed up the phone numbers the first time resulting in the first ever American Idol re-vote surely it could never happen again. After that embarrassing error, American Idol producers surely put some checks and balances in place to ensure that a similar error could never happen again in a million years. Wrong. It happened again tonight. After Anthony Fedorov's second performance, the phone numbers displayed in the closed captioning were incorrect. As visible in the image above, the first two numbers that appeared were 1-866-IDOLS-01 and 1-866-436-5701, and the last number was Text Vote 5704.
Only the last number is correct. The first two numbers are actually numbers for Carrie Underwood. This error only occurred in the closed captioning. The numbers in the audio and displayed on the screen graphics were correct.
Will this error lead to the second ever American Idol re-vote? Since the numbers only appeared in the closed captioning it is very unlikely that there were many fans that got confused by this error. However, as everyone now knows, Fox does not reveal the total number of votes for each individual contestant. What if Anthony Fedorov gets eliminated? His fans will never know if he got eliminated by a million votes or by a single vote. It could very well be that this error could confuse at least a couple people and send some of Anthony's votes to Carrie Underwood.
Also, even though this error might not affect the outcome, it raises even more questions about the reliability of the American Idol voting system. Obviously, American Idol producers have problems with numbers, and if they can't display phone numbers correctly, then how are we to believe that they can count millions of votes correctly.
Update: Not only were Anthony's numbers in the closed captioning incorrect, but 
the closed caption numbers were wrong for Bo Bice and Vonzell Solomon as well. As like with Anthony's number, Bo and Vonzell's phone numbers were incorrectly listed as 1-866-IDOLS-01 and 1-866-436-5701, which is the number for Carrie Underwood. This problem could be more serious than first reported. Many people view American Idol in large noisy groups and could possibly be watching the closed captioning for the numbers. These three errors could very well affect the outcome and send additional votes to Carrie Underwood that were not intended for her.
From Reality TV Magazine's blog
