It seems that Eurovision does not plan to give us a break with Eurodramas this year… If in Spain we have already started 2022 with widespread discontent over the Benidorm Fest voting system that made Chanel our representative, what has now happened in Turin with the contest final voting is extremely serious and splashes the singer again SloMo, that could have been in another position.
If you followed the voting of the International Eurovision Song Contest live on Saturday, you will remember that there were certain technical problems when connecting live with the delegations of some countries during the jury voting. Instead, when it was not possible to establish a connection, the scores were announced from the set Martin Osterdahl, contest supervisor.
That is what happened to Romania, whose presenter could not intervene to announce the votes, but what is strong is that, later, the Romanian state television TVR denounced that his vote was “replaced” on Saturday by a “substitute calculated in a non-transparent manner”. In other words, the organizers of the festival awarded another series of scores to the contestants, different from those that Romania had sent them.
In this way, on television we saw how the twelve points of this country went to Ukraine, instead of going to Moldova, which is what the Romanian spokeswoman would have announced live had she appeared on screen. Besides, Chanel would have received three points instead of one and Sam Ryder (Unodio Kingdom) would have gone empty instead of getting eight points from Bucharest.
Romanian spokeperson finds out LIVE at the same time as all of us about the “technical difficulties” that EBU reported last night.
This also happened to Georgia and Azerbaijan.“I can’t believe this. I really can’t.”#Eurovision pic.twitter.com/PpiBA2u1sG
— Raduc̶a̶n̶u̶ 🇪🇦🇳🇱🇷🇴 (@iamr4du) May 15, 2022
We already know that the televoting ended up giving victory to the song from Ukraine, with an abysmal difference in the points achieved by the first and second place finishers, who was officially Sam Ryder. However, between him and our Chanel, in third place, He only ended up mediating a distance of seven points, something that would be affected by the change in voting.
However, Romania would be only one of the six countries affected by the jury’s vote changes. According to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), this was due to the fact that “certain irregular voting patterns had been registered in the results of six countries” during the vote of the experts in the second semifinal and also in the final of the contest. For this reason, the EBU recalculated its votes based on estimates from surrounding countries before the final result was announced on television.
Although the list of affected countries has not been officially disclosed by the EBU, it is known that they are Azerbaijan, San Marino, Montenegro, Romania, Georgia and Poland. In fact, just like Romania, the Azerbaijani and Georgian spokespersons were also unable to reveal their points live.
Although the original votes of these countries are unknown for now, we do know those of Romania and, if the EBU had not modified the Romanian vote, Chanel would have been second with 461 pointswhile the United Kingdom would have obtained third place with 458. However, it is a classification that could change again if the points of the other five countries were revised.
In any case, it does not seem that the scores will be reviewed since the organizers have been blunt in a statement: “The EBU takes extremely seriously the attempts to manipulate the voting during the Eurovision Song Contest and has the right to remove them, as dictated by the rules, regardless of whether or not those votes influence the results”.
Photos | @chanelterrero