Miss Florida 2014 Elizabeth Fechtel is being forced to give up her beauty pageant crown because of a judging error. It almost seems like the Miss America system is suffering from an epidemic of queens losing their crowns and these beautiful girls are only paying the price for other’s mistakes.
In a related report by The Inquisitr , Miss Delaware 2014 Amanda Longacre was also stripped of her crown the other day but for a different reason. The pageant rules state that Miss Delaware contestants must not only be no older than 24 but they also cannot turn 25 before the end of the year. But despite Longacre giving the pageant officials her birth certificate, they let her compete only to grab the crown back. In short, they said the 25-year-old was “too old” to compete.
The similarities between the cases of Miss Delaware and Miss Florida 2014 do not end with the de-crowning. Longacre dropped out of college as required by the beauty pageant in order to fulfill her duties as Miss Delaware. Elizabeth Fechtel did the same with the University Of Florida and rearranged her whole life just to have the carpet yanked out from underneath her feet. Fechtel will also be missing out on the $18,000 scholarship she was supposed to be rewarded. She had been making plans to travel through Florida during the summer before returning to Miami to prepare for the Miss America 2014 beauty pageant.
The biggest differences between the two cases is in how the beauty queen was de-throned. It turns out the organizers of the event had incorrectly tabulated the scores written by the judges and this error was not discovered until an independent auditor checked the ballots. According to Elizabeth’s family, the reason why Fechtel lost her crown was because a mark by one judge had been overlooked:
“She told us that one of the judges had changed his mind while scoring first and second place the night of the pageant, and that in the last 15 seconds of the time allotted to vote, that he drew lines to reverse his first vote. He changed his vote from Elizabeth, to the first runner-up, Victoria Cowen. Therefore, Elizabeth is not the winner of the pageant, but first runner-up.”
Do you think it is fair for Miss Florida 2014 Elizabeth Fechtel to lose her crown based upon a mistake by the Miss America beauty pageant organization?
