It has been reported that while analysing the Jury Results, there had been attempts to manipulate the outcome of Six Juries, leading the European Broadcasting Union to use approximations instead.
Following the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 Jury Final, Martin Österdahl and the European Broadcasting Union, discovered that 6 of the 40 juries had delivered suspicious votes, with several irregular patterns. These 6 juries were Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino.
In response, before the live voting began, during the final, the EBU calculated an aggregated result, approximating what each of the 6 juries would’ve voted, had there been no interference. This was achieved by taking the last 5 years of jury results from said country, and seeing which 5 countries had voting the most similar to them. Then they took the jury results from those same 5 countries, this year, and averaged those to produce the jury results for each of the six juries. Considering the time pressures, it was the fairest way to provide an accurate result.
After each of the six broadcasters were informed of the new votes, the spokespeople from Azerbaijan, Romania and Georgia refused to read out points which (in their view) their jury did not award. Therefore Martin Österdahl stood in for them, although he explained on the live show that this was simply because they had failed to established a connection, it seems that this wasn’t exactly true. The other three countries agreed to deliver the points, as given by the EBU, but they have voiced concerns about the fact the EBU changed their results, in the days since.
The question remains why those six jury results were discounted… There has been no official comment from the EBU, apart from a single 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.
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.
It has been reported, however, that a group of people with connections to Russia bribed these jurors to vote in a certain way. This has not been confirmed. Other reports suggest that each of these six countries may have had a voting pact with each other, so they all gave each other their top marks. Whatever the reason was, Mr. Österdahl spotted voting irregularities, before the results sequence, in the live final, and did his best to rectify it, so the fairest result possible could be presented.
Contrastingly, in 2019, a similar thing happened, whereby the Belarusian jury gave a tampered set of results, however, Jon Ola Sand (the then Executive Supervisor), failed to spot this, and the false results were presented on the night. It was only some time later, after analysis of the results, that these irregularities were spotted, and a similar aggregated result was used, with the European Broadcasting Union having to submit a new set of Official Results, following the live final.
