EBU release on voting patterns during the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 and summary of related experiences

The votes of the professional jury of six countries were found to be suspect and replaced by an aggregate result by the EBU, as stated in its announcement after midnight on 15 May 2022; the EBU announcement is published without changes.

“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.

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.”

Following the publication of the voting results, during the examinations of the results, it was revealed that the scores of the following six countries show a high degree of similarity between the results, and the names of the professional jury of the following countries have been removed from the official scoring page of the Eurovision Song Contest:

• Azerbaijan
• Georgia
• Montenegro
• Poland
• Romania
• San Marino

According to the latest information from ESCXtra, Romania’s spokesperson could not announce the final results compiled by the Romanian public media, and other sources reported that the live connection for the Azerbaijani spokesperson was broken by the organisers.

Technical problems during the jury scoring

The above announcement was made by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) during the announcement of the jury scores for the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest final, in the same time slot in which the scores of the jury panels were announced by Martin Österdahl, Executive Supervisor and Competition Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, instead of the local broadcaster, for the next three of the 40 countries that entered:

• Azerbaijan (8th of 40 spokespersons – live connection not established)
• Georgia (31st of 40 spokespersons – live connection not established)
• Romania (28th of 40 spokespersons – live connection not established)