Bodog Beat

As usual, there is no clean win on American Idol. (Fox Images)

America was shocked, nay stunned when the American Idol favorite to win, Adam Lambert lost an almost sure thing title to the Alabama boy, Kris Allen.

Now the New York Times is breaking the story that the vote could have been swayed by AT&T. The Times says that AT&T provided free text-messaging and instructions on casting blocks of votes to two parties of Kris Allen supporters in Arkansas. However, AT&T did not provide this for Lambert.

A power text is the ability to send 10 or more text messages by pressing a single button, which the Times claims can "have an exponentially greater effect on voting than do single text messages or calls to the shows toll-free phone lines."

A spokesperson for AT&T said, “In Arkansas, we were invited to attend the local watch parties organized by the community. A few local employees brought a small number of demo phones with them and provided texting tutorials to those who were interested.”

It will be interesting to see how many votes these phones accounted for. So far, Fox has offered no comment.