Voting at EBU
A lot of grumbling has been felt from broadcasters after ESC 2025. I am often not too bothered by it, as I really dislike hypocritical reactions after the fact. All these broadcasters knew all the rules, probably better than the public when they decided to sign up.
There have been discussions—or questions without solutions, I should say—about how voting is handled by EBU. Again I think complaining is dumb because the broadcasters (presumably) knew how the voting was going to happen when they signed up.
One of the grumblings this year has been focused on Israel. Israel’s state-sponsored broadcaster used their sponsoring to fund an international marketing campaign for their song. Which is all within the rules. And that may have lead to people casting solidarity votes without even checking out any other songs or watching the program. This combined with how people could vote 20 times per payment method may have lead to an inflation of votes.
Note that nothing about that is against any of the rules. It is a little hard to figure out the exact rules and playbooks as someone from the public, but you can still find this right from the EBU’s mouth:
Viewers can submit their vote by phone call, SMS or via the official app. They can vote up to 20 times. Voting tariffs are set by each Participating Broadcaster and will be presented on screen during the shows.
From: How the Eurovision Song Contest works.Viewers in the countries of the Participating Broadcasters are invited to vote for their favourite songs by means of televoting (votes of the National Audiences by telephone and SMS, including the ESC App) and in certain countries, where such method is agreed upon between the Voting Partner and the Participating Broadcaster concerned, via paid online voting.
From: The Rules of the Contest 2025.
It is all a little confusing from these public resources. The rules clearly state an additional option for online voting and skip the 20 maximum votes completely.
From other online sources it seems the way voting is tracked means you can enter 20 votes bound to your phone number (call + SMS), another 20 through your installation of the app, and online potentially as many times 20 votes as you have payment methods to offer.
But me not knowing the exact details is different from the broadcasters not knowing. Remember that each national broadcaster must ensure that these voting methods become available in their respective countries, so they should know what they are implementing.
There is one thing that gave me pause:
[NRKs delegasjonsleder Mads Tørklep] fortalte at han også hadde bedt om innsyn i tallmaterialet for de norske stemmene under årets Eurovision.
EBU nektet ham innsyn med forklaring om at ved offentliggjøring av tallmaterialet var det en risiko for at noen kan analysere seg frem til en måte å manipulere systemet på.
Here we have the head of the Norwegian deligation stating he has requested the tallies so they can actually make an informed opinion of the situation. And then we have EBU refusing to share this information because public analysis of it might show more ways to cheat the system.
If your voting system can easily be subverted by people watching the tallies, maybe it is time to revise what you are doing.
Let’s take it all the way: STAR Voting, anyone?