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March 19, 2009

Woz accuses DWTS producers of manipulation, then backs down

Things are getting a little dicey with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and the folks at Dancing With the Stars.

Tuesday, he reportedly wrote to his Facebook group about how he felt the producers were not being fair in not outright stating that the couples who ended up in a dance-off were actually the bottom two. He said that he felt they were picking the non-homegoing couple just for drama's sake.

But he has since backed down, and with a vengeance. Here's an excerpt of the apology:

I hurt a lot of honest people.

Today, a storm kicked up over my allegations. I started my apologies
but it has to go further than that.

The top people of this show, ones responsible for counting audience votes and keeping them honest told me all the specific details of where their numbers came from. More than that, they explained how they can catch onto various forms of manipulation of the system by exactly the methods I had thought out in my head that would work. I was offered an opportunity to see the equipment they use also. You can tell when things are extremely on the level. You can also see why the exact totals cannot be released. That would make it harder to detect fraud. One main way that they detect fraud is when the phone-in votes and text votes and internet votes don't follow each other, percentage-wise. There are other things they look for as well that IT experts would detect as signals of something wrong.

Posted by Sarah Kickler Kelber at 2:13 PM | | Comments (0)
Categories: Dancing With the Stars
        

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About Sarah Kelber
Sarah Kickler Kelber, an editor in the features department since 1999, got sucked into reality TV with the first episode of MTV's The Real World in 1992. Then came Survivor and American Idol, and suddenly, the genre was everywhere. She started blogging about it for The Baltimore Sun in January 2006 and has logged more hours watching and writing about such shows as Dancing With the Stars, Big Brother and, of course, Idol, than she'd like to admit.
Follow @realityck on Twitter
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