Bermudian singer Paul “Eminence” DeShield was ecstatic to be crowned the winner of the Beachfest Crown Song Competition onstage at the event last month.

While he was presented with a cardboard crown and an oversized cheque, a week later he was surprised to be told that the rules had been changed after the fact, and someone else would be taking the crown.

“They said the winner would be announced at Beachfest and a winner was announced at Beachfest, but then a week later they announce another winner,” he said. “They didn’t even mention me in their press release.”

Mr DeShield was one of 51 local artists who collectively submitted more than 70 songs for the competition, organised by PRS for Music and The Chewstick Foundation. The selection was trimmed down to ten semi-finalists based on YouTube views, and then reduced again based on text votes.

The texts costed $1 each, with all proceeds going toward Chewstick’s youth, arts, cultural and community programmes.

Originally five finalists were to be selected for the finals, but due to a tie six finalists, including Mr DeShield, took the stage at Horseshoe Bay as part of the Beachfest festivities.

The grand prize winner for the competition was to be selected based 50 percent on the vote of a panel of judges, 35 percent on text votes and 15 percent based on the audience reaction.

Mr DeShield said that at the conclusion of the event, his song Wait Up had been named the competition winner and was informed that the organisers would be in contact with him soon.

“I finally got a meeting with them last week and they said I didn’t win,” Mr DeShield said. “Then it was in the paper that another person won and I wasn’t even mentioned.

“They said they changed it up at the last minute to take the text votes out. They basically changed the competition after it was over.”

In a press release announcing 13-year-old singer Quinn Outerbridge as the competition’s winner for her song Run Girl Run, Chewstick Founder explained that the text vote had been removed from the final tally because some people were found to be “abusing” that portion of the competition.

Chewstick founder Gavin (Djata) Smith said yesterday that while Mr DeShields had won more text votes than all of the other competitors combined, the majority of the votes came from overseas and there were large blocks of votes from individual phones.

“At the time we didn’t have enough data to fully comprehend what the issues were and this was at a live event and so we went through with the presentation,” Mr Smith said.

He said it was not explicitly against the rules for people to vote from overseas or submit multiple votes, but it was decided later that it was against the spirit of the competition generally.

“We could not in good conscience and in all fairness stand by the ruling at Beachfest, and so made the decision to disregard the text portion and utilise exclusively the results of the judges and Beachfest audience.”

Without the text message portion, Mr DeShield was ranked fifth in the finals, scoring 36.7 out of 50 from the judges and 13.2 out of 15 from the audience, compared to 44.2 and 13.5 for Quinn Outerbridge.

Mr Smith added the challenges in this year’s competition would lead to a revised structure for next year’s competition, including one vote per phone, only local texts and the elimination of the YouTube view count component.

Mr DeShield however called for an apology from the organisers for changing the rules after the fact, explaining that as a college student he had friends and supporters abroad. Regarding the multiple votes, he said the public had been encouraged to vote multiple times for their favourite performer.

“There was no limit on the amount of texts,” Mr DeShield said. “They said text as many times as you want, and then they took it out. They didn’t say anything about people getting their money back or anything. People paid a dollar per text and then it was taken out completely. Everyone paid a dollar per text and it doesn’t count.

“They were encouraging people to vote as much as possible, but when they do they say it’s not in the spirit of competition?

“I would like for Chewstick to give some sort of apology so that people know what really happened.”