Eurovision

Belgian media claim agreement to exchange points is the reason behind jury exclusion

Belgian broadcaster VRT have published an article in which they claim an agreement to exchange points at Eurovision was the reason the EBU decided to intervene. As a result, the jury scores from six countries were nullified and replaced with a simulated result.

Close source confirms agreement

VRT, who organise the Belgian Eurovision entry alternating with RTBF, revealed that a close source have confirmed the agreement. The agreement would allegedly have suggested that Romania, Montenegro, San Marino, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Poland would exchange points with each other. The company auditing the results noticed the irregular voting patterns and decided to intervene.

Remarkably, during the live show of the Eurovision Song Contest last night, the hosts did not speak to the spokespersons of Georgia, Montenegro and Romania. Instead, Executive Supervisor Martin Österdahl delivered the jury votes for said countries. In their statement, TVR from Romania said they had no idea that Eda Marcus would not appear on screen in the Grand Final.

Last night’s statement by the EBU

The decision to remove the jury votes from six countries was revealed during the show last night. In several countries, commentators mentioned the decision live on air. Only afterwards, investigation revealed which six countries were involved. Those six, all from semi-final 2, had their jury votes being omitted in both semi and final. This led to some odd voting decisions, such as Romania not giving points to Moldova or San Marino not giving anything to Italy.

Below you can find the statement released by the EBU last night.

The full EBU statement can be read below:

In the analysis of jury voting by the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) pan-European voting partner after the Second Dress Rehearsal of the Second Semi-Final of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, certain irregular voting patterns were identified in the results of six countries.

In order to comply with the Contest’s Voting Instructions, the EBU worked with its voting partner to calculate a substitute aggregated result for each country concerned for both the Second-Semi Final and the Grand Final (calculated based on the results of other countries with similar voting records).

This process was acknowledged by the Independent Voting Monitor.

The EBU takes any suspected attempts to manipulate the voting at the Eurovision Song Contest extremely seriously and has the right to remove such votes in accordance with the Official Voting Instructions, irrespective of whether or not such votes are likely to influence the results and/or outcome of the voting.

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4 Comments

  1. So, these juries with EBU intervention finally gave 53 points to Uk against only 24 to Spain. Sweden was very close to Uk with 48 points. If you deduct them all, Spain would be classified second. But maybe EBU trusted more BBC to host the event in case Ukraine cannot organise it next year.

  2. @Joe Caster – The EBU don\’t just randomly allocate votes if a jury is removed. They do it according to a formula based on the results of the other countries in the disqualified country\’s allocation pool. It\’s just coincidence that this favoured the UK over Spain based on the countries that were removed. Trying to cook up a conspiracy theory about the votes here is a bit much.

  3. It’s more than that, it actually is a conspiracy !
    Moldova’s jury was also forced by EBU to give zero points to Romania !

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