North Macedonia win Eurovision 2019 jury voting as EBU clarifies mistake in Belarusian voting

The EBU have responded to the error in the Belarusian jury voting at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019. They have now clarified that a mistake has indeed taken place and that the results have now been updated. The update now sees North Macedonia as the new jury winner.

“A human error”

EBU have clarified the error now and have classified it as a human error. They have given out the following statement on Eurovision.tv:

The Belarusian jury was dismissed following the reveal of their votes from the first Semi-Final which is contrary to the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest. In order to comply with the Contest’s voting regulations, the EBU worked with its voting partner digame to create a substitute aggregated result (calculated based on the results of other countries with similar voting records), which was approved by voting monitor Ernst & Young, to determine the Belarusian jury votes for the Grand Final.
The EBU can confirm, following standard review practices, we have discovered that due to a human error an incorrect aggregated result was used. This had no impact on the calculation of points derived from televoting across the 41 participating countries and the overall winner and Top 4 songs of the Contest remain unchanged.

EBU

What has changed?

The results have been amended to respect the correct mechanism being in place. This means the new full results are as follows:

1. The Netherlands (498 points)
2. Italy (472 points)
3. Russia (370 points)
4. Switzerland (364 points)
5. Sweden (334 points)
6. Norway (331 points)
7. North Macedonia (305 points)
8. Azerbaijan (302 points)
9. Australia (284 points)
10. Iceland (232 points)
11. Czech Republic (157 points)
12. Denmark (120 points)
13. Cyprus (109 points)
14. Malta (107 points)
15. Slovenia (105 points)
16. France (105 points)
17. Albania (90 points)
18. Serbia (89 points)
19. San Marino (77 points)
20. Estonia (76 points)
21. Greece (74 points)
22. Spain (54 points)
23. Israel (35 points)
24. Belarus (31 points)
25. Germany (24 points)
26. United Kingdom (11 points)

The change obviously has an effect on the incredibly tight jury voting. There we now have a different winner, as North Macedonia gain ten more points to now overtake Sweden. The jury results of the final now are as follows:

1. North Macedonia (247 points)
2. Sweden (241 points)
3. The Netherlands (237 points)
4. Italy (220 points)
5. Azerbaijan (202 points)
6. Australia (153 points)
7. Switzerland (152 points)
8. Czech Republic (150 points)
9. Russia (126 points)
10. Malta (87 points)
11. Cyprus (77 points)
12. Denmark (69 points)
13. France (67 points)
14. Greece (50 points)
15. Iceland (46 points)
16. Slovenia (46 points)
17. Albania (43 points)
18. Norway (40 points)
19. Serbia (35 points)
20. Estonia (28 points)
21. Germany (24 points)
22. Belarus (18 points)
23. San Marino (12 points)
24. United Kingdom (8 points)
25. Spain (1 point)
26. Israel (0 points)

With this new result, we have a couple of noteworthy updates, which we will discuss below:

• North Macedonia now win the jury voting. They were two points behind Sweden, but with their ten points versus two for John Lundvik, they now take a six point lead: 247 for Tamara Todevska, 241 for John Lundvik. It also means “Proud” finished in seventh place, not eighth – so North Macedonia’s best ever result is now #7!
• Norway sadly drop out of the top five. They were first awarded seven points, but it now turned out they shouldn’t have. They drop to 40 jury points. Their televote victory of 291 points still sees them in sixth place, but Sweden now overtake them.
• Israel‘s only jury points came from Belarus: Kobi Marimi received the douze from Minsk. However… he was actually in last place there. That means that we now have 0 pointer in our jury voting, as Israel failed to pick up any points there.
• France and Slovenia both lose two places on the total ranking. These are won by Cyprus and Malta. With that, Tamta now makes it to the left side of the scoreboard as #13.
• San Marino already surprisingly finished top ten with televoters, but they’ve now climbed another spot to #19. They lose four jury points, but their competitors in Estonia lose ten, meaning Serhat now beats Victor Crone by a single point.

The error was first discovered on Twitter by user @euro_bruno. You can read more about his discovery in our first article, which you can read here.