Romania’s public broadcaster has accused Eurovision song contest organizers of underhand tactics after its jury was eliminated from taking part in the calculation of the final results of the contest.
Scandal
A scandal erupted after organizers eliminated the juries from six countries from the calculation of the final marks, claiming there were major suspicions that they rigged the results. The announcement was made after the final vote.
Romania was one of the six, along with Moldova, Azerbaijan, Poland, San Marino and Montenegro. It was unclear what the organizers meant by ‘irregular voting patterns.’
The votes were then replaced by an aggregated result based on countries with similar voting patterns in both the second semi-final and the grand final.
But TVR accused the organizers of being non-transparent and dishonest, saying they only found out about the allegations after the competition had ended.
Final ranking
“We were surprised that the result of the Romanian jury’s vote was not taken into account when calculating the final ranking… We remind you that the Romanian jury decided to give the maximum number of points to the representatives of the Republic of Moldova,” and not Ukraine as happened, an earlier statement said.
“The notice did not specifically mention Romania, nor did it receive an official notice of a suspicion at the end of the second semi-final, which involved identifying so-called “irregular voting patterns.”
“The rules were changed during the game,’ it said.
Moldova
After Romania’s jury was eliminated, Romania ‘gave’ 12 points to Ukraine and none to Moldova, while Chisinau did not award any points to Romania either. Normally, both countries would have given the other points.
Ukraine’s folk-rap group Kalush Orchestra won the song contest with „Stefania” riding a wave of goodwill from European nations to clinch the country’s third win at the glitzy event.
It beat main rivals the United Kingdom and Spain at the competition which was held in the Italian city of Turin.
Here is the EBU statement.
“In the analysis of jury voting by the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) pan-European voting partner after the Second Dress Rehearsal of the Second Semi-Final of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, certain irregular voting patterns were identified in the results of six countries.”
EBU
“In order to comply with the Contest’s Voting Instructions, the EBU worked with its voting partner to calculate a substitute aggregated result for each country concerned for both the Second-Semi Final and the Grand Final (calculated based on the results of other countries with similar voting records).”
“This process was acknowledged by the Independent Voting Monitor.”
“The EBU takes any suspected attempts to manipulate the voting at the Eurovision Song Contest extremely seriously and has the right to remove such votes in accordance with the Official Voting Instructions, irrespective of whether or not such votes are likely to influence the results and/or outcome of the voting.”
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