There is a story on WWE.com about technical difficulties as part of the text message based voting system on last night's three hour "Power To The People" edition of Monday Night Raw. The strangest result ostensibly voted on by the fans was that Mason Ryan overwhelmingly won a text message vote over Sin Cara and Jack Swagger to be Evan Bourne's opponent. With Sin Cara being a spectacular high flyer like Bourne, it seemed like there was no way he wouldn't win a legitimate vote. Swagger made sense as a back-up since he had been feuding with Bourne. Ryan made no sense as part of the match.
Dave Meltzer speculated on last night's free edition of Wrestling Observer Radio that it was because he looked so much bigger and more imposing than Cara, which is a stretch, which seems unlikely to me. At first, my gut reaction was that the voting was fraudulent to screw with the fans as Vince McMahon is known to do, but WWE has always done legitimate votes in recent years, so I was kinda puzzled.
According to the WWE.com story, the voting system was overwhelmed by votes for Kelly Kelly as "option B" to get the Divas' Championship shot (which the challenger was scheduled to win regardless of who won the vote) in the first match. The votes leaked into later polls, so Mason Ryan, also "option B," ended up working with Bourne in the second match instead of rightful winner Sin Cara, who got 90% of the (separate, unofficial) WWE.com chat vote.
I don't doubt that this is true, but I have to wonder if WWE would've made a statement about it if this happened in a vote with more ambiguous results. This was, by far, the most suspicious-looking vote of the night. Would they have done the same thing if it just skewed the Dolph Ziggler vs Kofi Kingston stipulation vote?
WWE.com is promising more details on this story later in the day, and I'll post an update whenever they do.
Update #1: WWE.com has updated the linked article to include more information:
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.
Update #2: WWE has announced that Evan Bourne vs Sin Cara will happen on next week's Raw to make good on the voting system problems.