If you’re wondering why Sanjaya Malakar has done surprisingly well in American Idol, here’s one possible answer: dialers.
Dialers are pieces of software usually stealthily installed on a victim’s computer to automatically dial expensive premium telephone numbers. The victim only finds out when they receive their phone bill. In this case, the dialer, openly available on a reputable download site, is a voluntary install designed to automate the voting process in Idol:
Sanjaya War Dialer uses your computers modem to automatically dial the American Idol voting number over and over and over again until you tell it to stop. Automatically cast hundreds or even thousands of votes for Sanjaya with the click of a button. Make Sanjaya win and help us ruin American Idol.
The Sanjaya War Dialer has its own MySpace page where users report on their votes — 600 a hour, for some. The show’s producers are aware of this, and have been lopping off blocks of votes if they seem to be coming from power dialers, as they call them, for several weeks.
Gaming the system by voting for inferior contestants is not new. Vote for the Worst claims to have been around since 2004. And DialIdol.com offers dialers for other shows, including Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Canadian Idol and Celebrity Duets. DialIdol isn’t so much about gaming the system as predicting who will be voted off by seeing which hotlines are busiest.
Should we be surprised by this? No. It’s not easy to tell how many people are using these dialers, and it would need to be a lot to make it work. But we shouldn’t underestimate the number of people willing to do this, either for fun or because they have money riding on it. And of course they may not need to vote – they only need to stop other people from voting for other contestants. Do we believe American Idol when it talks of 35 million votes? That’s a lot of phone lines.
I would say this: Any kind of voting technology that isn’t transparent and clear is likely to be manipulated, either by smart hackers with something to gain, or by those arranging the voting.
(My colleague Carl Bialik talks about voting and power dialers in his blog a couple of days back. Thanks to Handoko for the Twitter tip.)
