May 17, 2004
Electronic voting that doesn't work
American Idol, the popularity contest that Sir Elton John has called racist May have another serious flaw: the voting system sucks. Each night the show is aired, there is a 2 hour window in which people are encouraged to phone in as often as possible to vote for their favorite vocalist. Apparently American Idol is losing votes. and not just a few, but millions of votes. Apparently, the existing pipes just can't handle the raging flow of calls from teenage schoolgirls.
Apparently it gets dirtier. There's money to be made. Now that you can bet on anything online, people are betting for who's going to be stay on and win, and then using technology to swing the vote. People are using autodialers and software to automatically place thousands of phone calls to swing the votes. In another scam, a company bought up phone numbers similar to the American Idol phone numbers and then had messages that told people to dial a 1-900 number to vote.
Oh I can't wait till the Presidential voting system goes electronic.
Posted by Bryant at May 17, 2004 01:21 AM
Comments
The automatic call distributor feature of ACC works like the Automated Receptionist, but ACC decides to which extension number the call should be transferred. ACC distributes work evenly to a pool of workers responsible for handling phone calls.
Posted by: john ibrahim at May 30, 2005 04:01 AM