Voting errors during Raw’s “Power to the People”

The interactive event aimed to give the WWE Universe the ability to choose what they wanted to see on their television screens. Unfortunately, uncontrollable difficulties created by an influx of heavy voting traffic resulted in not every one of the more-than 697,000 recorded votes to be properly counted. WWE television production had no idea of these issues until after the show had ended.

During Monday’s Raw broadcast, WWE fans were given the option to text A, B or C to 46993 (GOWWE) in order to decide what they wanted to happen on the show. Things went perfectly at first when text votes selected Kelly Kelly (option B) to take on Brie Bella for the Divas Championship. However, our vote tabulating provider’s system became overwhelmed, causing these votes to spill into later polls. This technical mishap soon led to Mason Ryan (also option B) being voted into a match against Evan Bourne — even though, as it was later discovered, Sin Cara had received 90 percent of the total votes in WWE.com’s Live Chat poll, and should have been Bourne’s opponent.

Votes for the third poll’s bout — Kane vs. Mark Henry in an Arm Wrestling Contest — were counted correctly. However, problems began to occur again during the next poll determining a match stipulation between United States Champion Dolph Ziggler and Kofi Kingston. At this point, so many text votes were received that the system overloaded, crashed and had to be restarted.

With little information to work from, WWE management selected to follow the system’s earliest projections, which determined that the 2-out-of-3 Falls Match had been the people’s choice. It was not until later that it was discovered that “Vickie Guerrero Banned from Ringside” was actually the top vote getter.

Restarting the tabulating system allowed for things to run smoothly with the voting for the Triple Threat Match to determine a No. 1 contender for the WWE Championship going off without a hitch.

Regrettably, technical difficulties occurred once more leading up to the night’s Six-Man Tag Team Match main event, when it became apparent to WWE management that text votes were again not being tabulated properly. At this time, a decision was made to turn to WWE.com’s Live Chat Poll for the official judgment. With the power still in the hands of the people, the WWE Universe selected the Elimination Match (option C) by an overwhelming 87 percent, leading to this stipulation being enacted.