We thought we were kidding when we suggested that Fox use Jimmy Carter to oversee the next American Idol elections. Now, as Fox changes its story daily, it's actually starting to look like a good idea.

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The Associated Press reports that, on Friday, a Fox spokesman reversed Thursday's story, which said that Idol host Ryan Seacrist had simply "misspoken" on live television when he first announced the difference in votes between winner Ruben Studdard and runner-up Clay Aiken as first 13,000 votes and later 1,335 votes, although Fox subsequently claimed the true difference was actually 130,000 votes. The Friday statement, by contrast, said that Ryan read the cards correctly, but the cards given to him were incorrect. However, the Fox statement failed to say how wrong numbers could possibly have ended up on the cards fed to Ryan.

We can only see two possibilities here: (1) Ryan requested that Fox not make him look like such a screw-up, since it could be harmful for Ryan's new Fox-produced daytime show; or (2) now we know where all of the voting equipment and poll workers replaced in Florida after the 2000 presidential election fiasco ended up.

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