Montenegro’s broadcaster RTCG put out a statement regarding the exclusion of their jury vote during Eurovision 2022. Indeed, Montenegro was one of six countries having their jury votes disqualified by the EBU. The others were Azerbaijan, Georgia, San Marino, Romania and Poland.
A request for clarification
In their statement, RTCG explain that they sent a request for clarification to representatives of the EBU. They claim that their voting procedure was regular, and see “no reason to suspect any form of irregularity”.
After the information made on the Eurovision website that the voting of juries in six countries was contested at the second semifinal evening of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022, we would like to inform the public that we have sent a request for clarification to authorized representatives of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
They stated that the voting in the RTCG study took place in a regular procedure, and after that it was duly certified by the EBU, and that they see no reason to suspect any form of irregularity and expect a detailed answer to that question.
“When it comes to the final night, as the audience could see in a live television broadcast, the votes were announced publicly and the taste of our jury largely coincided with the “schedule” of countries on the final table,” the statement said.
The RTCG Eurovision delegation points out that they will inform the public as soon as possible about all the information they receive from the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022.
RTCG’s remarks on their statement
This is close to the facts described in TVR’s statement for Romania. The Romanian broadcaster also stated that their jury vote took place according to the procedure, and that the results were first received and seemingly approved. In Romania’s case, it was clear that the broadcaster learnt about the incident with the public statement from the EBU, and not before.
Unlike the Romanian statement, this message did not include the information on which country originally go Montenegro’s jury’s 12 points.
One of six countries with “irregular voting patterns”
Montenegro was one of six countries whose jury votes were cancelled. The public statement from the EBU did not give the names of these countries, but the absence of detailed jury rankings on the eurovision.tv website for all six made the list clear enough.
These six countries were Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Romania, San Marino and Poland. Several broadcasters have already put out statements on the matter.
The jury votes of these countries were replaced by the aggregated results of other juries with “similar voting patterns”. These are actually the countries sharing the same allocation drawing pot, as we discovered when Belarus’ jury had to be replaced in a similar fashion in 2019. As such, countries in the same pot (Azerbaijan and Georgia in Pot 3, Romania and Poland in Pot 5) gave exactly the same points. Montenegro is in Pot 1, and had its jury vote calculated by an aggregation of the votes from Albania, Croatia, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia.
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