The stupid 50 vote limit on American Idol Facebook voting is crazy when they do not limit it on phone voting so I thought I would do a little experiment. I timed how long it took me to vote both ways, to see how long it takes to use up the 50 vote Facebook limit and then figure out how quickly I could vote using the "Redial" button on my home phone.
I logged onto Facebook and I was able to cast 3 votes in 40 seconds since luckily I did not type in a bad captcha code on those first three tries. With a little practice I was able to get my 3 vote speed down to 34 seconds, but I did type a bad captcha code maybe 1 out of 10 tries. So if I say I averaged 3 votes in 36 seconds, that is 1 vote in 12 seconds or 5 per minute. So it only takes about 10 minutes of constant Facebook voting to reach your 50 vote limit. Unfortunately, the stupid Facebook application does not tell you when you reach your limit, so folks could do it for a long time and not realize they are done and voting for no reason. Let me just tell you if you are voting online for more than 15 minutes you probably have reached the 50 vote limit already. It is then time to use somebody else's Facebook account (or create multiple ones if you believe in that sort of thing.)
Using the phone was much easier, but you do have to wait a second or two between calls to drop the phone line (yes, I use a land line!) Nevertheless, I was able to get a nice rhythm going pressing, OFF, ON, Redial, and waiting for it to say "Thank you for voting for contestant...". Even with a 1 second pause after hanging up I could make a call in about 10 seconds and could cast 6 votes in a minute, slightly faster than the online voting rate, but you can do it forever. In fact I could theoretically phone vote the 50 vote online maximum in about 8 minutes. If I were obsessed I could have voted for 2 straight hours or 120 minutes, so I could conceivable have voted 720 times if I could keep up my 6 votes a minute rate. If the 53 million votes they talked last week about were all voted by crazed fans who voted 700 times, that only becomes 75,000 people.