Seriously???

[mynamewastaken]

I'm suggesting that although the show hides behind the facade of being fair and democratic, in reality the producers have a tremendous amount of sway over who goes on and who goes home, and it isn't *really* the voting public deciding this as they'd have you believe.

Consider: they don't reveal vote totals. They show who is in the final 3, but they won't even rank the contestants week by week? Why is this? Well, one hypothesis is that they can use this artificial restriction on the flow of information to their advantage, to create drama in the case of a statistical tie.

Without vote totals, it makes it considerably more difficult to handicap the actual value of a contestant, and therefore the producers can assign any value they want (by playing around with performance order, song selection, judge's comments, etc.)

I don't believe it's a coincidence that some contestants have a last minute song change, or that the contestant who goes last performs better.

And what about the old saying: "If Simon says you're going home... YOU'RE GOING HOME"? If that's not fixing the game I don't know what is.

I also don't know what the deal was with Paula sleeping with a contestant one year. It's possible that it's just "Paula being Paula" but it really isn't that much of a stretch that she was helping him get further on in the show than he deserved to.

I could go on...