Update: More On Major RAW Fan Voting Issues, Problems With Kofi-Ziggler Results
As noted earlier, WWE released the following statement on their Twitter page Tuesday:
"Technical errors occurred in some of the voting results during Raw: Power to the People. Check with WWE.com throughout the day for more."
A subsequent statement has since been released on WWE.com with the headline reading "Text Vote Screws Sin Cara."
"WWE apologizes to the WWE Universe, Raw's 'Power to the People' voters, and especially Sin Cara and Evan Bourne. The match vote was skewed by a heavy backlog of votes from the Divas Title Match. More details on WWE.com throughout the day."
UPDATE: WWE.com just posted yet another update on this which reads:
"WWE would like to apologize for technical difficulties that occurred during the 'Power to the People' edition of Raw on Monday night.
"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.
"Stand by for more details to be reported by WWE.com throughout the day."