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2003-05-22
Very Interesting.... Trin your field reporter reporting in: They said on ABC news that 250,000 votes went by mistake to a company in Indiana called Cinergy. I don't think that that many people misdialed. This is crazy. The people thought they were getting thru to AI and of course they were not. They ran a tape and the woman that was calling in was trying to vote for our buttercup Clay. Do I smell a recount in the works? Here is the article in full: Evansville, IN May 22 -- On Tuesday night, nearly a quarter million American Idol fans dialed the wrong number when they tried to cast their votes for Clay and Ruben. The error caused some crazy calls for an Evansville business. American Idol fans really worked the telephones this week to cast their votes for Clay and Ruben. But in their hurry to vote, some mistakenly misdialed the digits and ended up calling an 800 number for a client of Cinergy Communications in Evansville. "It's unbelievable," Jonathan Phillips said. "I can't believe how many people got it wrong." Nearly a quarter million calls were actually placed to two of Cinergy's telephone lines. The company operates the lines for a church in Tennessee. Cingery employees were baffled at first, until an American Idol fan on staff spoke up. "We looked up the number on the American Idol web site and it was just one digit off from this," Phillips said. Here's most likely what happened. The hotline for viewers to cast their vote includes the word Idol in it. When some viewers tried to dial O, they probably pushed Q by mistake, making their call one digit off. Luckily, Cinergy's computer system was able to handle to huge volume of calls. "It was a test that we never could have orchestrated this big to see how our system would perform," Phillips said. They even kept track of totals for employees who are American Idol fans. And according to these results, at least twice as many fans preferred Clay over Ruben blog comments powered by Disqus |