In response to the Rainbow Awards fraud allegations, we would like to release the following statement:
After close scrutiny of the evidence presented to us, we see no reason to conclude fraud was committed in the judging of the specific category or by any judge.
* Members of the jury have the right to nominate one book, and only one, when the Awards cycle begins in a category they are not judging for. The Judge who was called upon did not nominate the specific book, they read it in first round but they didn't read it in the finals, when the winners were selected.
* The winners in the finals were chosen by 5 judges and to combat bias in judging the highest and lowest score for every book is removed in calculating the final result for every single book and this was also the case in the contended category
* The more than 150 volunteering judges are established readers, writers and reviewers in the LGBTQ Romance genre and therefor not completely unbiased, but every effort is made to select the books every judge is given so that affiliations with publishers, genres and categories (for writers) limits the chance of bias.
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