If the reports coming from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette are true, maybe the news that we had yesterday about American Idol voting irregularities is meatier than we thought. One fan that says she voted for Kris Allen over 10,000 times.

It's also interesting that Idol rules state that power texting, the kind of texting that AT&T reps showed Kris Allen fans how to do, is against the rules. Isn't there some sort of built-in safety net for the voting? How can one fan vote over 10,000 times for one person? Shouldn't it be one person, one vote? Or one household, one vote? Or maybe one phone number, one vote? I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the results. I have no idea. But it does seem that a better system could be in place.

Fans of Kris Allen feel justified that their favorite won American Idol this year. Fans of the presumed favorite to win, Adam Lambert, have been lamenting his loss. Looking for reasons why Adam lost, as Bob reported, they've put some of the blame on AT&T. I think it's more a matter of the jaded state of California, where Lambert hails from. They're not as impressed with a famous singer in their midst as the people of Kris Allen's Arkansas are.

People in the Midwest and South don't have celebrities around every corner, and we're not as "hard" as the East Coast. So we still get excited when a "hometown" boy or girl does good. Think back to Season Five when Katharine McPhee went "home" to Los Angeles to a crowd of hundreds while Taylor Hicks was blown away by tens of thousands in Alabama (and they already had one Idol!).