Wednesday, May 22, 2013

ESC Voting: Should We Worry?

If you are completely unaware that there has been some concerns raised about the voting in many countries this year, you either do not suffer from post-Eurovision depression or, you don't plan on looking at anything Eurovision-related until November.

Anyhow there appears to be a lot of surprises going on about the voting. This, as usual, suggests that there is some level of vote rigging going on.

Personally I think there is a straight forward problem here. Countries were not ready for the change in the voting system this year and many of them have not realised the impact it would have on the voting.

Before I continue my rant I would like to clearly state that I think the results of the contest were indeed very fair and the top 10 was correct in my opinion.

Of course questions must be raised about Azerbaijan targeting smaller countries for votes by trying to affect the results of the televote and these results should be checked for anything unusual.

However I would stress to everyone not to jump to conclusions about how certain countries voted in the final and then in the semi-final. Firstly it is my opinion that some of these anomalies occur because the new voting system had little affect on the semi-final results as there were only 16/17 countries taking part. However when this was expanded to 25 or 26 songs to vote on questions do have to be asked about whether it is right that either the jury or the televote should have as much power as they clearly do to wipe out the others votes.

I call on the EBU to release a full set of results for the 2013 contest including a breakdown between each individual country, stating the percentage of televotes that each song achieved and a breakdown of how each jury member voted.

If the EBU truly want to prove that there is no vote rigging in the contest they will have to release full results with the maximum amount of detail possible.

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