This year’s Eurovision Song Contest saw a major issue regarding the voting in several countries.
Ukrainian rap group of this year’s competition on Saturday with their hit song Stefania, after being locked in a tight race with the UK’ Sam Ryder who finished second place.
However, during the second set of semi-finals earlier in the week, the European Broadcasting Union has confirmed they picked up ‘irregular voting patterns’ during the course of the night.
In a statement shared on the Eurovision website, the union said: ‘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.’
It continued: ‘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.’
The second instalment of the semi-finals took place on Thursday evening and saw 18 countries, including Ireland, San Marino, Malta, Israel, Belgium and Finland.
It has not been revealed which countries had their juries removed.
The revelation comes just as as a ‘rigged farce’ and claimed Kalush won on a ‘sympathy vote’.
According to the broadcaster, voters were motivated emotionally by Russia’s devastating war on Ukraine.
He tweeted: ‘Nobody who voted for Ukraine thought it was the best song because it obviously wasn’t anywhere near the best. Even Ukrainians don’t think it was the best song..
‘They got the sympathy vote, which is fine so long as we drop the word “contest” from Eurovision.’
Almost nine million people tuned in to watch the exciting Grand Final, which saw Sam top the leaderboard with an impressive 283 points.
