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Richard Stirton

Richard Stirton was on Sunday crowned the first ever Voice SA winner.

Although the show was packed with great performances, it was once again a voting glitch that overshadowed the glitzy evening.

A few minutes before the winner was due to be announced, host Lungile Radu interrupted proceedings to say that the votes cast during the night’s live broadcast would not be added to the final tally as the voting platforms were not working.

Due to the technical problem, M-Net decided not to count any of the votes cast on Sunday and instead had to revert to the votes cast during the week to determine the winner. This meant that the top 4’s final performances, including that of Zimbabwe’s Jeremy Olivier, did not have an impact on who won the final prize.

According to host Radu, this decision was made in accordance with The Voice SA’s terms and conditions on their website.

M-Net said the voting platforms folded due to an avalanche of votes that were cast during the live show. The broadcaster added that it did not know who the public voted for on Sunday night.

“Basically The Voice South Africa broke the internet on Sunday night,” said Lani Lombard, M-Net’s head of publicity, who said M-Net isn’t sure of exactly what went wrong and why.

“There was a massive number of votes coming through on our voting platforms and as a result of that – as you know we’re a responsible broadcaster – we’re always very transparent on what’s going on in our voting platforms. And we work with our auditors as well, to make sure that the results are fair.”

“Because of this, we decided to go back to what the results were at the close of voting lines on Thursday night. And that’s as per the terms and conditions. So if you go into the terms and conditions, it clearly says that if there’re any technical issues, we’ll go back to the previous votes.”

This however was not the first time a voting failure hit The Voice SA. Earlier on in the competition the late delivery of 8,000 SMS votes through Vodacom saw 13 singers instead of 12 compete in one of the live shows.

In 2009, M-Net was mired in a viewers’ voting scandal when Sasha-Lee Davids was announced as the winner of the 5th season of Idols although Jason Hartman was the real winner with 200,000 more votes that were not counted in time. – Channel24.