The 28-year-old Los Angeles native became the first finalist to be voted off the sixth season Wednesday, after flubbing the lyrics to Diana Ross' "You Can't Hurry Love."

Rogers' memory lapse wasn't the only flaw in his performance, which the judges deemed boring and unoriginal.

Randy Jackson told the former backup singer that he sounded like…a backup singer.

"It was kind of boring, uninteresting, you forgot the words," Jackson said. "It's got to be a lot better than that for me, man."

Simon Cowell took Jackson's criticism a step further, telling Rogers he "sounded like "a background singer for a background singer."

"No star quality in that performance, no originality," Cowell said. "Absolutely not good enough. Sorry."

Rogers acknowledged that nerves were a factor in his faulty performance and said he had "no hard feelings" about his elimination.

Joining Rogers in the bottom three were Phil Stacey and votefortheworst.com's contestant of choice, Sanjaya Malakar.

The anti-Idol site has deemed 17-year-old Malakar's vocals the weakest in the competition, thereby making him the most deserving candidate of its endorsement.

As soon as Malakar was declared safe Wednesday night, Vote for the Worst credited its minions for prolonging his survival.

"It's obvious that VFTW saved Sanjaya, because he was in the bottom two and didn't leave," read a message on the site. "Had we not voted for him, he would have been gone. Great work, everyone!"

Despite the display of bravado on the site, Vote for the Worst founder Dave Della Terza admitted in an email to E! Online that he was "shocked" Malakar had survived another round.

"I thought when they stuck him in the bottom two that he'd be a goner," Della Terza wrote.

But with an average of one million hits on any given day and around three million hits on show nights, Vote for the Worst's power to command votes seems undeniable, much to the dismay of Idol fans eager to see Malakar get his walking papers.

"I get mostly hate mail from enraged fans of other contestants, because they think that by helping Sanjaya, we're hurting their favorite," Della Terza wrote. "All I say is that we help one person, if their guy gets the least votes, it's because they didn't vote."

To Della Terza's amusement, he is often threatened with bodily harm by fanatical Idol fans convinced he is meddling with the show's rightful outcome.

"I've received tons of death threats, but usually the words are all spelled wrong and they threaten to "muder" me or "assinate" me which makes no sense. So I don't take them seriously," he wrote.

"The Website is just a humorous site, and if people don't get that, they're probably not that intelligent."

As for singling out Malakar as the show's worst singer, Della Terza said it's all in good fun.

"I love the kid, and people say we're crushing dreams by keeping him around, but we like to think that we're just helping Sanjaya's dream," he wrote. "We love our picks and nothing would make us happier than to see Sanjaya get a record deal out of this and get to go on the Idol tour."

To that end, Vote for the Worst is urging its devotees to keep the votes coming, pointing out that if Malakar makes it through the next round, he will automatically go on tour at the end of the season as one of the top 10 contestants.

Meanwhile, Wednesday's episode also featured a performance from this week's celebrity coach, Diana Ross, who sang "More Today Than Yesterday," from her most recent album, I Love You.

Some 28 million votes were cast on this week's performances, according to Fox, averaging out to around one vote per viewer.

The talent competition continues to dominate the ratings, with last week's episodes drawing between 27 million and 29 million viewers and holding down the top three slots.

Next week, the contestants take on the music of the British Invasion, with '60s singers Lulu and Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits serving as the celebrity coaches.