Jordin or Blake?

HOLLYWOOD --
Wednesday night's vote tally sending Melinda Doolittle home to Brentwood, Tenn. -- but not before she hits the concert trail with the American Idols Live summer tour (coming to Louisville on Aug. 17) -- might qualify as a surprise, even an injustice, in that she is clearly the most accomplished pure singer of this year's crop.

Yet now that the contest comes down to wholesome R&B teen queen Jordin Sparks and wholesome, beat-boxing, robot-dancing Blake Lewis, we'll have a far more intriguing finale this week.

With Melinda, there would be no surprises -- we've seen how competently she fields every song and style thrown at her. She's the quintessential studio pro, the talented utility player you want at your beck and call precisely for that faultless versatility. But there was little in the way of a personal stamp on any of it. Her musical foundation was poured, set and long-ago cured.

Blake and Jordin, however, are obviously in the gestation stage as performers, embryonic as potential artists, so growth and musical evolution remain possible. Blake's kinetic energy is his chief asset, and he'd be wise to play that up rather than making any more awkward attempts at smoldering sexuality.

Jordin, unquestionably Blake's vocal superior and the rightful heir to this season's Idol crown, could become a full-fledged pop-soul diva -- if she winds up with handlers committed to bringing the most out of those preternaturally soulful vocal cords. Ahh, to hear what Atlantic Records veteran Jerry Wexler might have done with her in the '60s.

Whatever the outcome, and as is the case in any surprising Idol result, there are questions in the air. Can this voting process be for real?

Behind the curtain, the woman at the helm feels your pain and understands how the show plays into your most obsessive tendencies. Speaking in her Burbank office on Monday, the day before the final three performances, Cecile Frot-Coutaz, Idol's executive producer, addressed the issue of whether and how the voting could be messed with. Frot-Coutaz is chief executive of FremantleMedia North America, which along with Simon Fuller's 19 Productions oversees the Idol industrial complex.

"Every year is different," Frot-Coutaz said. "There's years where it's obvious a contestant will stand out -- like the Carrie Underwood year. And there's years when it's less obvious. The first year was really not obvious at all: We thought Justin Guarini was going to win it. This year, I think, was more of a journey.

"If you rewind the clock 12 weeks or 15 weeks I probably would have said, 'Well, it's going to be between LaKisha (Jones) and Melinda.'"

Like most of the other Idol producers, Frot-Coutaz thinks transparency and choice are crucial to Idol's success -- the audience's belief that this is their show and everything is in the open. She thus expressed chagrin at conspiracy theories about the show's voting system.

Frot-Coutaz ran through the process. "It's not mysterious, really. Where do I start?" She explained the 800 numbers are managed by AT&T, which has agreements with the local exchanges that put the calls through. Another company, Telescope, tabulates the raw data, analyzes it by area code and turns it into results.

"But if at any point anything looks different or that we may have questions about," she said, "we have the ability to go back to AT&T and to the labs and say, 'We'd like to see all the minute-by-minute data on area code, whatever, 201.' And they can dig into the data and sort of give us that level of detail."

What would draw her attention? "Occasionally we've had situations where two people at the bottom were very close, so when that happens you want to go back and just make sure all the phone lines work properly everywhere so that you know, the result is the results. We've had a few situations that were a bit hairy. The show goes out at 6 p.m. (Pacific time) live on the Wednesday, and by the time the phone lines close, it's like 2 or 3 in the morning. It's actually quite a decent amount of time to do some data analysis if we need to."

Much discussed in Idol pundit circles is the practice of automated or "power" voting, facilitated by Web sites such as DialIdol, which provide tools for repeat dial. Equally discussed is small print in Idol's official explanation of voting procedures that states the producers retain the right to disqualify votes if they see evidence of power voting.

Some in the conspiracy community have pointed to this as a possible way producers might fix the results. Frot-Coutaz said that while the show can spot and quickly disqualify power voting, "it turns out that's never happened. Think about it: There's millions of votes per contestant. So when someone goes, that's hundreds of thousands of votes usually between two contestants. So to make a difference you would need to have a lot more of these power-dialers than people claim there are."