Since January 1, Realbrighton.com have been running a straw poll to attempt to gauge LGBT community opinion on the proposals on the table to run this years Pride in Preston Park, the Wilde Ones Rescue plan and Pride/Fisher proposal.

RealBrighton closed the poll early on Wednesday January 20, after concerns about irregular voting patterns on the computerised poll emerged.

Sam Milford, editor of Real Brighton said:
“This poll was never intended as a scientific poll, it was an attempt to reflect public opinion concerning the two proposals on the table for running Preston Park in 2010.

“There were a total of 719 votes registered.

“We have now analysed these votes by hand, and without knowing which vote was for which proposal we had to remove over 350 votes that we did not feel were representative of real people or real votes cast.

“These were votes that raised doubts for multiple reasons and were all cast in sustained blocks of 50 or more at a time (approximately two minutes apart, about enough time for the same person to register a new account in order to vote) rather than organically over the first 20 days of January.

“We analysed email addresses and other technical information about votes to help us decide whether we believed the vote to be genuine or not.

“There were 360 votes left that we considered to be likely to have been cast by real people.

“Of these 360 votes, 41 were cast in favour of the Pride/Fisher proposal and 319 in favour of the Wilde Ones Proposal"

The final result of the poll, following the adjustment is:

Pride/Fisher proposal 11.4%
Wilde Ones Rescue Package 88.6%

Sam Milford continued:
“We were not able to identify any irregular block voting for the Wilde Ones rescue plan.”

James Ledward, editor of Gscene magazine said:
“The purpose of the poll was to gauge what the average LGBT person in the street thought about the two obvious proposals for running this years event on Preston Park.

“The low number of people voting was disappointing but maybe is a reflection of how people have disengaged with Pride the organisation per se.

“Our Pride is in the process of being hived off to a corporate bidder by a group of trustees who are not in touch with public opinion and who are being influenced by workers who are more interested in their jobs than the needs of the LGBT community in Brighton and Hove at large.”

“It will be interesting to see how the Pride spin doctors attempt to spin this fiasco.”

There was no one working in the Pride office available to comment.