American Idol Busy Signals Up With No More Save!

Well, tonight I voted using my trusty telephone and the American Idol toll-free 866 numbers, and I tell you that sure is a lot faster than typing in those illegible Captcha codes on the online voting. I cannot believe online votes are the only ones that are limited and they make their stupid captcha codes so hard to read! Why not just three letters or numbers like I've seen other places, or just doing a simple math problem (5 + 7).

In any case since the DialIdol score was pretty worthless last week (putting Joshua Ledet first and the almost eliminated Jessica Sanchez third from the bottom), I looked at some of their other numbers from last week to see which were best at trying to predict the real bottom 3 and Jessica ending up as the bottom in votes. One metric which seemed promising was the busy percentage from last week:

Here we see Jessica second from the bottom and Elise Testone next to her, although Joshua is third from the top (although he received the lowest number of overall votes so his sampling number is a lot lower:

If we look at the actual physical raw number of busy signals from last week let's see who had the lowest numbers: Jessica was the lowest at 217, then Joshua at 222 and then Colton Dixon at 258 and then Elise at 317. Colton is just at the bottom of the "busy percentage" because he had so many darn vote processed via DialIdol, over 8.8K calls and 8.56K votes. That is the only reason he is at the bottom of the percentage. If you look at Joshua he has the highest percentage only because he had so few votes cast for him, less than a third of what was cast for Colton. Let's look at the "busy percentage" and "raw votes" for this week (90 minutes after the show ended):

One thing to notice this week is that Jessica jumped from the bottom of the busy percentage to the top and is now duking it out with Hollie, Elise and Joshua for the highest busy percentage. If you look at the raw numbers, though, Hollie has far and away the most busy signals, almost 1,300 already which is much more than Phillip had last week (the one with the most busy signals). That means Hollie's fans are power voting via telephone quite diligently this week and she is probably pretty safe.  Elise and Jessica also have almost 1,000 busy signals so far tonight, so I bet they are pretty safe too. The contestant with the lowest actual number of busy signals right now is Skylar Laine with only 249 and Colton only has 266 despite having over 6,000 votes. It will be interesting to see what the final numbers are tomorrow morning after the west coast people get to vote.

The Idol Chatter voters were not very accurate last week, overwhelmingly thinking Hollie Cavanagh was history when she did not even hit the Bottom 3. So far they are guessing Elise is going home tomorrow by a pretty wide margin:

Until I saw the Dial Idol numbers, I too thought either Elise or Hollie was history tomorrow, but now I am wondering if perhaps Skylar or even Colton may be in trouble. Could Colton actually fall into the Bottom 3 tomorrow? That would leave Phillip as the only contestant never to be there this season. I think both Joshua and Skylar have a good shot of being in the Bottom 3, and I can easily see Elise there yet again next week with them. But Colton being there could be their "shocker" of the week, even if he does not end going home.