Viewers and fans will be allowed to cast their ballots up to 50 times, as long as they vote during that broadcast's designated voting period, according to Entertainment Weekly.
This new method of voting won't replace the traditional toll-free telephone call or text message, but for Facebook users, it certainly sounds a lot easier than dealing with the plague of busy signals or spam texts we've experienced when using the other two voting methods on American Idol.
While this is the first direct online voting method, you might recall last year's "Idol Fanatic" Facebook voting routine, which used Ribbit online telephony to automatically dial in votes submitted via its Facebook application. That looks to be a thing of the past -- a visit to that Facebook page today showed it to be defunct, with no activity since May 18, 2010, a week before last season ended. Too bad, because the page's users had an uncanny ability of predicting who would be voted off the show before it was over.