STV says sorry after X Factor result goes out before poll ends

Viewers saw Amelia Lily, 17, return to the programme on Saturday night after she was declared the winner of a vote to replace axed Frankie Cocozza with one of four former contestants.

But a story about her win was published on the website of STV an hour before phone lines closed, prompting fans to accuse the programme of vote-fixing.

The channel put the blunder down to a “technical hitch”, and said pre-written pieces about all four contestants had gone live on the website.

STV said in a statement: “The STV web team prepared stories regarding each contestant in anticipation of the result and, due to a technical hitch, all four stories went live on our website.

“We would stress that this was purely a technical hitch and for this we apologise.”

Amelia, Jonjo Kerr, 2 Shoes and James Michael were all in with a chance of returning to the competition after Cocozza, 18, left following boasts about drugs.

Fans took to Twitter to express their annoyance after seeing the announcement about Amelia on the website.

Jade Blackburn wrote: “Apparently Amelia is already the winner of tonight’s vote but I wanted 2 Shoes back!”

Darren Ruback tweeted: “Not sure how the result has been leaked by STV when ITV are still asking you to call. Fix!”

But X Factor bosses insisted the phone lines were still open at the time, posting on the micro-blogging site: “Voting is still open for your favourite act to return!! A video was just released by mistake! Keep voting.”

Amelia was declared the winner, with 48 per cent of the calls. The 17-year-old, who went out in the first live round, told viewers: “I have been so emotional back stage – thank you to everyone who voted for me.”

She went on to sing Queen’s The Show Must Go On.

Earlier, millions of viewers tuned in expecting to see the sixth live studio round, but found a highlights reel playing instead, which the show’s bosses blamed on a “technical failure at BT Tower”.

The show finally came on air 15 minutes late with an apology from host Dermot O’Leary.

A spokesman for BT said: “We can confirm that there was an unusual power spike this evening which disrupted services from the BT Tower for a short time.

“We are looking into the circumstances behind the outage.”

Cocozza was kicked off the show on Tuesday after boasting about using cocaine. Show chiefs said he had broken programme rules.

He said everyone should have known what he was like from his first appearance. “From my first audition I walked out on stage and got my bum out and had seven girls tattooed on it. And people are saying ‘he’s not a good role model’, but they should have known that from the start,” he said. “I’ve had this massive reaction, and reading all the stuff, I’ve realised that I was starting to be a role model and, yeah, I feel bad about that now, really bad about it now.”