Here's my understanding of the AT&T power texting "scandal":1. AT&T denied that 38 million votes came out of Arkansas. They say they don't know the number of votes and don't release them. The Fox news station that first ran the story then retracted their earlier statement, saying their reporter got faulty information. Um, okay.
2. AT&T then admitted in an official statement that some AT&T reps went to a couple of Kris' big voting parties in Arkansas, passed out "a few" free phones, and taught people how to power text (i.e., send more than one text message at a time). The statement went on to say that the actions of these employees were inappropriate, and they'll remind employees to not do this sort of thing next year, but it had no influence on the overall voting. Meanwhile, I've read at least one other report (via MJ's site) where a woman has stated that she used one of those free phones to send over 10,000 text votes in for Kris. Whether she's exaggerating or not, I think it's safe to say that Kris got a lot of support at these parties.
3. Fox issued a statement saying that they are confident that Kris is the winner and that the independent group that verifies the vote totals has safeguards in place to eliminate power voting. Of course, no one is saying what those safeguards are, and no one is stating what the final vote tally is. The "independent" company won't talk without Fox's permission, which isn't forthcoming.
4. Kris and Adam are totally fine with the outcome and have stated that they consider this whole thing to be a non-issue. Adam's told people to move on.
My own take is that Kris won, that he probably got a lot more support from Arkansas than Adam got from his home state of California (where people, you know, have lives), and he probably would have won without the whole power texting thing. Adam is a more in-your-face kind of performer, and I suspect that the Idol demographic isn't quite ready for someone like him to be the winner. I also know from message boards that Adam fans were power texting, too, and that they were sharing with international fans (who aren't supposed to be able to vote) how to use various computer programs to get their phones to send in votes for Adam. So an argument could be made that fans from both sides were "cheating."
At the end of the day, Kris won, Adam came in second, and they're both happy about the way things turned out. So it's time to move on. It would be nice if Idol would change its voting system so that you could only vote a certain number of times per contestant, or if they'd open up text voting to everyone with a cell phone, not just AT&T customers, or if they'd allow people to vote on the Internet. It would also help if they'd be more open about how they tallied votes and kept safeguards in place (even the Academy Awards lets people know how voting works behind-the-scenes) and if they'd release the final voting tallies. But they're never going to do any of that, so there's no point in me or anyone else fretting over it.
All this to say, if Adam and Kris are happy, I'm happy. End of (long) story. :-)
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