The first Melodifestivalen Semi Final took place last night and Eric Saade and Jessica Andersson qualified for the Finals. As it turns out, several voting app users complained about voting issues resulting in some to question the outcome. SVT admitted while there have been some bugs with the voting app, it didn’t affect the overall results.
For the first time, the public was able to vote using a new Melodifestivalen app. Users can vote “vote with your heart,” up to five times for each song like regular votes. The app votes have the same weight as the phone and text votes.
Over 22.000 app downloads were registered and the Swedish broadcaster confirmed that there was a problem where the app froze right before the broadcast started. The voting function got stuck at times and the only way to resolve it was to go back to the live mode.
Head of Melodifestivalen Christel Tholse Willers said to the Swedish Tabloid Newspaper Expressen: “I’m glad though that this happened before the broadcast, so we could gather more data about it during the show”. The app was tested and Tholse Willers said that such things can happen and that it’ll be fixed when the participants of the second Semi Final will take the Stage next week.
Several users claimed that the voting tool didn’t start working properly until three songs into the show. The three songs performing first that night were all eliminated and some of them were considered fan favorites. The last two songs of the night qualified directly to the finals. The fact that the running order basically matched the results only adds fuel to the rumor fire.
Executive Producer Christer Bjorkman denies this and is positive that yesterday’s result are accurate “We compared the SMS votes with the App votes and they match”.
Since there was no discrepancy between the voting app votes and those send via text, the outcome will not change and the direct qualifiers and Second Chance candidates will move on.
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Source: Expressen
