Scrapping District 6 Survey Results; Redo Forthcoming

-By Gypsy C. Gallardo

With regret, the Power Broker magazine is scrapping the results of its District 6 survey, which was a first public attempt to gauge voter preferences in the competition to fill the open seat being vacated this year by Karl Nurse.

The survey results were too murky to be useful as a true measure.

Special thanks to research assistant Aleyah Conway, we were able to identify 105 potentially valid responses.

For those interested in our process:

We received 404 total responses, which included over 100 obvious duplicates (i.e., a person providing their first and last name and age, then submitting multiple records, as many as a dozen).

We eliminated all entries from individuals who did not provide a name or who provided a first name only.

A research assistant then spent eight hours searching via Facebook and Google to attempt to confirm that full name responses matched St. Petersburg residents, of the same age and ethnic group as cited in their responses.

The redux left us with 105 records. However, given the extreme doubt cast upon the process by – shall we say – overly enthusiastic fans of the candidates or possibly by candidates themselves generating illegitimate records, I cannot publish results with any confidence.

As examples of the shenanigans and potential masquerading that give me pause….

Our research found distinctly named people as far away as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Nassau, Bahamas, participating in the survey.

We also found names too common to verify as valid responses, even though these names could be found among St. Petersburg residents.

Among those we found and matched, several claiming to live in District 6 had addresses in other parts of the city.

Moving forward, the Power Broker will transition to the SurveyMonkey Advantage tool. It is our hope to relaunch a District 6 survey soon.

#PromotingTheVote at TheBurgVotes.com.