During the grand final, the EBU released a statement that mentioned that six of the participating countries were found to create an “irregular voting pattern”, this led to the jury votes from the six countries being completely removed and replaced by a “substitute aggregated result”. Now, we finally get to see, what the EBU were so suspicious about.
The results of the six juries
With all of this, The EBU decided to release the full scoreboard from the six involved jury groups, which includes the juries from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania & San Marino.
Highlighted in red, is where the six countries placed in each other’s jury rankings. As can be seen with 4 out of 6 cases, all countries involved did rank each other in the top 5, while the Polish and Montenegrin juries still ranked other countries high, but only slightly different, still ranking each other highly.
The EBU even went on to explain, what is an “irregular vote”, which is explained by the EBU as the following:
- a) Deviation from the norm – Does the result reflect the overall taste of the other professional jurors? Bearing in mind that they are all music professionals requested to vote on the basis of the same criteria laid down under the Rules of the Contest (e.g. a national jury puts at the top of its ranking (a) song(s) that the majority of the others
- b) Voting Patterns – Are there visible patterns of voting within the jurors?
- c) Irregularities – Did the juries observe the Rules of the Eurovision Song Contest?
- d) Reoccurring Patterns – Do other countries repeat similar voting patterns?
- e) Are there beneficiaries – If deviations occur, who benefits from the result?
If the answer to more than two of these questions is Yes then the pattern is considered as irregular and the votes affected by such irregularity are removed provided that the irregularity is confirmed by the pan-European Voting Partner (benefiting from 17 years of experience administering the ESC voting) and acknowledged by the Independent Voting Monitor.
At the very bottom, it states that “If the answer to more than two of these questions is Yes“, then it’s considered an irregular vote, which means all six countries involved has ticked more than enough answers, to be considered irregular.
Whether the broadcasters of the six countries has any response, we shall soon see.
Finally seeing what all the trouble is all about, do #YOU believe the EBU were on to something, or is the EBU missing or wrong about something in this scenario? Let’s hear what #YOU think on our forum HERE or on our social media sites.
