This year, the post-Eurovision news cycle has been dominated by stories of broadcasters publicly asking for more transparency and more debates from the EBU. VRT, RÚV, RTVE, RTV SLO, and others, have been very open with their statements and doubts, especially over the voting process.
In response to these concerns, which have also been echoed by websites and content creators from the fan community, Eurovision Song Contest Director Martin Green has published an open letter to the community as a whole.
Martin Green’s open letter
Dear trusted and treasured Eurovision Song Contest community,
The EBU has listened to and engaged closely in the conversations among Members, our fans and in the media following this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).
I want to again congratulate the winner JJ and the team from ORF. His performance and song rightly, clearly and validly won the Contest and we want to make sure any ancillary conversations do not overshadow this epic achievement.
The ESC voting system includes multiple security layers and a comprehensive set of rules to ensure that a valid result is generated. Our voting partner – Once Germany GmbH – uses redundant systems and multiple platforms to ensure the correct delivery of votes to the central system.
For the Eurovision Song Contest, specially designed systems are used to monitor and prevent fraud. Additionally, more than 60 individuals in Cologne and several others in Vienna and Amsterdam monitor the voting process in each country and maintain direct contact with telecommunication and broadcasting partners globally. All results are verified through an 8-eye principle by the CEO and senior employees of Once, who collectively have over 40 years of voting experience.
Independent compliance monitor EY oversees and authenticates the results. Every decision related to the outcomes is documented and assessed. The entire process, including the result calculation of the platform and the voting results is thoroughly reviewed and verified by EY.
All audience voting, be it SMS, call or online shows evidence of the motivation of communities or diasporas around certain contestants. This can be for many reasons including personal attributes, back stories, geographic affiliations and current affairs. Historically the ESC has been as open to this as other singing and music competitions and reality television.
Every year the Reference Group for the Contest, which contains representatives from and acts on behalf of our Members, studies the data provided by our voting partner Once to make recommendations of any actions available to us to ensure our rules and systems remain fail safe and take into account contemporary external factors such as advances in technology and external influences. This process will happen as it always does in June this year.
Alongside the discussions of the Reference Group, one aspect the EBU will be looking at is the promotion of our acts by their delegations and associated parties. Such promotion is allowed under our rules and acts to celebrate the artists, increase their profile and launch future careers – it’s very much part of the music industry – but we want to ensure that such promotion is not disproportionally affecting the natural mobilization of communities and diasporas we see in all entertainment audience voting.
Another example is the number of votes we allow per person – 20 per payment method. This is designed to ensure that audiences of all ages can vote for more than one of their favourite songs and there is no current evidence that it disproportionally effects the final result – but the question has been asked and so we will look at it.
The EBU and I will be, as we always do, engaging our Members for their views on this and other matters.
I’ll end as I began, by congratulating JJ and ORF who won the Eurovision Song Contest 2025.
Best wishes,
Martin Green CBE, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, European Broadcasting Union
Some debates open, others closed
Before analysing the content of the letter, let us salute the method used by the EBU and Martin Green in particular. Penning a message to the entire community, described as “trusted and treasured” goes beyond a simple letter to the EBU members and broadcasters. It is engaging with a bigger part of the Eurovision “sphere”, and goes in the right direction set by the independent review made after Malmö 2024.
The letter also states from the beginning that the EBU is ready to review the events as they do each year, starting in June, and is open to exchanges and debates with EBU members in order to make the contest better.
Voting fraud allegations
Most of the letter addresses the doubts cast over the voting process by several broadcasters. The first paragraphs refute the idea of voting fraud, considering that the voting partner Once (formerly Digame) and auditor EY have all the fail-safes and methods to ensure all the votes, and only the legitimate votes, are counted. Green also confirms that everything is documented and assessed, which should perhaps represent a good source of information for broadcasters demanding the breakdown of their votes and more transparency in general.
No broadcaster has clearly claimed that there has been fraud in the voting (although RTVE, demanding an audit, is probably the member closest to this kind of allegations). But a few, like Avrotros, have deplored that the public voting failed to meet the “apolitical” standard of the contest.
Diaspora and politics in the voting – structural elements and advertising
Green confirms that audience voting is influenced by external elements such as the existence of diaspora communities, geopolitics, geographic and cultural affiliations, etc.
“Historically the ESC has been as open to this as other singing and music competitions and reality television.” This kind of sentence is very “Martin Green-ish”, using other standards in the industry to compare it to the contest — he did the same to justify more limited access to rehearsals, considering the former rules of access to be “unprecedented” and thus aligning the contest with other standards.
The letter thus considers these elements to be structural, something the contest has to make up with. Green does address the concerns which have risen from the “EBU Spotlight” investigation over the advertising of some artists during the contest, especially from Israel. He states that promotion and advertising is allowed and part of the logics of the music industry, but that it must not disproportionately fuel some specific communities to affect the voting.
“We want to ensure that such promotion is not disproportionally (sic) affecting the natural mobilization of communities and diasporas we see in all entertainment audience voting.“
Debate open on the 20 votes – but little change to be expected?
Green is open to a debate about the rule allowing up to twenty votes for each payment method, as the question has been raised by member broadcasters. But his letter also defends the rule, by explaining its reasoning (“ensuring audiences of all ages can vote for more than one of their favourite songs“) and by refuting the idea that it has an influence on the voting.
The influence has been easily theorized and proven to be possible by people online, claiming they had been able to vote up to a hundred times or even more, with our colleagues from ESC Insight voting up to 160 times with only two people and eight personally-owned credit card. The stronger use of online voting, which is open in the majority of participating countries, and which seems to represent the majority of the votes in countries with mixed system (telephone, SMS and online voting), as we saw in the Spanish and Belgian results earlier this week, does make it theoretically open to manipulation.
Green disputes the idea by saying that “there is no current evidence that it disproportionally (sic) effects the final result“. It is possible that a full breakdown of voting data confirms this, if, for example, credit or SIM cards voting twenty times do not represent a huge chunk of a national vote. Although we do not call into question the conclusions of the ESC Director, it would be useful to get more transparent data so that members and the community can draw their own conclusions.
What do you think about the letter? Does it also address your concerns? What can be done about the rules of the contest in the upcoming review next month? Tell us more in the comments below or on social media, at @escxtra!
