After the great final gala of Eurovision, a new controversy has arisen regarding the way of acting of the festival: the EBU (the European Broadcasting Organization) he changed the votes of up to 6 countries in which he believed he detected certain irregularities.
Recalculating
The organization has stated that “in the analysis of the votes of the jury by the EBU after the second dress rehearsal of the second Semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022, certain irregular voting patterns were identified in the results of six countries. To comply with the festival’s voting rules, the EBU worked with its partner to calculate a substitute aggregate result for each country involved for both the second semi-final and the final.”
According to the UER, this irregularity basically consists of agreement to vote for each other although not much more has been specified. According to the Official Voting Rules, enter within what is allowed for the organization to eliminate those votes although with it will affect the results of the semi-final and the final.
Several countries have been very upset with the modification of their votes: Montenegro and Romania ask the festival for explanations. Romanian television points out that it did not give its highest score to Ukraine but to Moldova and criticizes that they did not let their presenter, Eda Markus, enter the gala live to announce her score. Depending on the response given by the organization, the country has said that “reserves the right to take measures to correct the situation”.
Narmin Salmanova of television Azerbaijanalso tells of a similar experience since, finally, his highest score went to the United Kingdom when it was originally going to be Ukraine.
I was a spokesperson for Azerbaijan and I supposed to announce 12 points for Ukraine. But they didn’t make a connection, gave results of their own and then said that 6 countries’ including Azerbaijan’s were removed.
— Narmin Salmanova (@SalmanovaNarmin) May 15, 2022
Same situation for Georgiaaccording to their representative Helen Kalandadze, whose highest score was also going to be Ukraine and, instead, they went to the United Kingdom: “I have no fucking idea what happened and why I haven’t received any explanation yet” She complained.
russian hackers
As if that wasn’t enough, the italian police has stated that he had to deal with several cyberattacks during the final. The police thwarted several attacks carried out by the pro-Russian group Killnet. They highlight very positively the participation of RAI (Italian television) to have been able to counteract the offensive.
“The preventive activity carried out by the police based on the analysis of the information taken from the telegram channels of the pro-Russian group, also allowed inferring important security information, already shared with the RAI for the prevention of new critical events” have commented on the incident.