Chewstick founder Gavin (Djata) Smith defended the decision to remove text votes from the Beachfest Crown Song Competition, saying many of the votes were unverifiable.

Further clarifying the decision yesterday, Mr Smith said the core of the issue had not been overseas texts, but the nature of the texts themselves.

“Several of the artists had texts from overseas,” he said. “That was not the problem. The real issue was that Eminence’s texts were unverifiable and they were coming from apps not phones. That was the source of the problem.

“We received a total of 5,343 votes. That was for the entire competition. Of those, 3,705 were for Eminence. Roughly 700 of those had to be discarded because they were just unintelligible, and 2,500 of them were unverifiable and seemed to come from apps.

“It made it unfair for the whole competition, for all of the artists.”

The Beachfest Crown Song Competition, launched this summer, saw more than 50 artists competing for a grand prize valued at $10,000, with six finalists taking the stage at Beachfest. According to the competition’s rules, 35 percent of the final decision would be based on text votes, while 50 percent would be based on the decision of a panel of judges and 15 percent based on crowd reaction.

While Paul “Eminence” DeShield was crowned the winner on the day of the event, he said he was surprised to learn a week later that another artist had actually won the competition because the text votes had been removed.

Mr Smith said on Tuesday that while Mr DeShield had won more text votes than all of the other competitors put together, concerns were raised after organisers noticed anomalies in the text votes.

“As a result, the final winners were selected solely on scoring from the judges and Audience at Beachfest,” he said.

“It was truly an unfortunate route to this conclusion, and we are sorry for the confusion this has caused. We would particularly like to apologise to Eminence as this has directly affected him the most, however we feel that fair-play is important and this was the only way to ensure a fair result.

“For clarity, this has not been viewed as cheating by anyone and no one was disqualified from the competition, however, the uncertainty around the text category could not be ignored.”

He added that Chewstick is actively working with cellphone providers to reimburse the proceeds from the test portion of the competition, which had initially been slated to support the Chewstick Foundation.

Mr Smith said the article appearing in yesterday’s edition of The Royal Gazette failed to properly state Chewstick’s position by not including references to the organisation being unable to verify the origin of the controversial texts, or that they appeared to come from apps instead of phones.

“What has happened as a result [of the story] has damaged not only the credibility of the contest but, as a knock on effect, the continued negative coverage in the newspaper and social media has threatened the viability of the competition moving forward along with the Beachfest Emancipation Celebration itself,” he said. “It’s extremely upsetting.”

In his full explanation for the decision received by this newspaper Tuesday afternoon, Mr Smith stated: “Upon tabulation it was determined that Eminence was the winner, which further added to the confusion because he was not deemed the winner by judges or audience, and ultimately one category had indeed dominated the scoring.

“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.

“Upon further investigation into the text portion we came across several anomalies. One being the majority of Eminence’s texts, which totalled more than the rest of the finalists’ combined, came from overseas.

“Second, that we couldn’t verify their origin and that they seemed to come from apps not phones, thirdly, in looking at the entire text results of the finalists across the board, there were large blocks of texts coming from individual phones, not from the broader community.

“The intention of the text and audience component was to allow an artist’s fan base to weigh in, not for an individual with the ability to do so, to decide the winner.

“While, this was not against the rules explicitly, this was against the spirit of the competition generally, and 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.”

The Royal Gazette contacted Consumer Affairs to find out if there was any avenue for legal redress open to Mr DeShield’s regarding Chewstick’s handling of the competition, and whether the charity could be compelled to return the money it made from text voting, however we had received no response by press time.