American Idol Conspiracy Theory: Is the Voting Sabotaged?

It happens every single season on American Idol. Talented singers are sent packing while others who are less gifted (to put it kindly) remain week after week. Most of the time, the voting results are hard to fathom, unless people are actually voting for the worst contestant at the suggestion of VoteForTheWorst.com.

This website rallies behind the contestant that the American Idol producers and the general public would most like to see eliminated. Vote For The Worst (aka VFTW) urges their minions to vote like baby stoats for the singer they deem most unlikely to succeed. VFTW would like to believe it plays a huge part in the idiosyncratic American Idol voting results. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't -- but they definitely seem to enjoy trying to sabotage American Idol every year.

Vote For The Worst claims that American Idol is not about singing at all, but about making an entertaining reality television show. And what makes good TV is watching bad singing and contestants who flounder like the proverbial fish out of water. The American Idol producers can hardly dispute this; they serve up copious amounts of that very thing during the lengthy audition segments of the show. They can't possibly blame VFTW or anyone else for suggesting that they let some really awful singers through simply because it makes the show more entertaining. (Case in point: Sanjaya Malakar from American Idol Season Six, in 2007).

I think it would be hard to prove that Vote For The Worst is sabotaging the American Idol voting results. From the looks of all the activity on the site, they do appear to have a lot of followers. But millions of people supposedly vote each week for the Idol of their choice. Can one website really make a difference? Moreover, who's to say that the American Idol producers themselves aren't behind the creation of Vote For The Worst? Think about it. The controversy that VFTW creates every season gets an amazing amount of press. It gets people talking about American Idol, and it gets them voting. How could that possibly be a bad thing for the show?

Then again, Simon Cowell has made a career out of being a caustic curmudgeon who seems to enjoy putting the singers down when they perform badly. Regardless of what he's really like in person, the television persona he created (or the American Idol producers created for him) is not very kind. It's conceivable that some viewers might be motivated to vote for the worst singers just to push Simon's buttons and watch him explode. During the 2007 Sanjaya Malakar voting debacle, Simon even went so far as to say he'd not be a part of American Idol the following year if Sanjaya were to actually win the singing competition. As if.

If the American Idol producers really cared about who won each season, they would have given the judges and/or recording industry professionals more power in the decision, but they didn't. When you put the power into the hands of the public, you have to expect the unexpected. You have to be okay with the "anything goes" reality of a reality TV show.

In the end, the question of whether Vote For The Worst can sabotage the American Idol voting and turn it into little more than a cheesy reality TV show is a moot point. Many people have always seen American Idol as nine parts reality show and one part singing competition, and don't give a fig about the results. Besides, coming in first is not a make-or-break situation, as many of the Idol contestants who didn't "win" the competition have gone on to enjoy success in the recording industry.

As for the folks behind VoteForTheWorst.com, they insist that championing the fish out of water makes for more entertaining television, and indeed it does. If the VFTW "pick-of-the-week" does happen to get ousted, they simply move on to the next least-desirable contestant. Their current poster girl is Megan Joy, who made it into the top nine this week. Many American Idol fans are crying foul and really ticked that Megan Joy is still in the competition, but Vote For The Worst is doing the happy dance and claiming victory once again. I don't care much either way. Do you?