Eurovision confirms that there were "unprecedented irregularities" in the voting and that is why it will not change its scores

This Wednesday, five days after the Eurovision final and after the request for explanations from several delegations whose votes of their professional jury were recalculated by the organization, the European Broadcasting Union (UER, the body in charge of organizing Eurovision) has explained in detail in a statement the irregularities they detected in the votes of six participating countries in the second semifinal of the festival.

The statement confirms that the countries involved are Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino.

These "unprecedented irregularities", as the text underlines, led the organization of the contest to recalculate the scores of the juries of those territories (televoting was not affected).

The announcement on Saturday that the organization had changed the score of some countries led to a controversy that has led some of those affected to ask for explanations of what happened.

These explanations have arrived in detail, as well as the confirmation that Eurovision will not alter the scores or the classification of the countries.

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The organization detected a suspicious pattern in the scores given by those six countries, participants in the second semifinal of the festival.

As the statement explains, four of the six professional juries from those countries gave the other five countries their highest scores, and the other two juries also placed the rest of the group in privileged positions: one jury placed the five countries among their six favorites , and the last of the judges placed four of the others in his

4. In this way, four of the six countries received at least 12 points, the maximum score.

The alarm went off when the organization verified that five of those six countries were below the

8 for the juries of the other 15 countries that voted in that semifinal.

In fact, four of the six countries were in the bottom six for the other 15 voting countries.

Such a large difference in criteria made the organization suspicious.

"There are no precedents for an irregularity of such a scale in the jury's voting pattern," says the EBU statement, which has also presented the tables with the scores of those countries, where the exchange of votes is clearly observed.

Please is that they did not hide anything fjakfkdd pic.twitter.com/0klwo5od65

— Toni (@norwinds) May 19, 2022

According to the Eurovision rules, if irregularities are observed in the voting pattern of the countries, the organization has the right to eliminate those votes and replace them with an automatically recalculated score.

"Given the unprecedented nature of the irregularity detected in the second semi-final, the EBU decided to exercise its right to eliminate the votes of the six juries in question from the grand final in order to preserve the integrity of the voting system," the text explains.

For the voting of the final, in which Ukraine won and Spain finished in third place, the same criteria was followed, with those delegations awarding scores automatically calculated based on the scores of other countries.

The EBU takes advantage of the statement to reconfirm the decision to maintain the recalculated votes of those six countries in the second semifinal and the grand final, and, therefore, confirms that the final classification of the Eurovision representatives will remain as it was at the end of the final. .

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