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305
Eurovision accused of ‘encouraging manipulation’ after Israel’s near-win [Spains RTVE and Flemish VRT demand investigation into voting system] (www.independent.co.uk)
submitted 1 day ago by Saleh@feddit.org to c/europe@feddit.org
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National broadcasters for Spain and Belgium have now complained to the competition’s organisers, the European Broadcasting Union, after Israel won the public vote by a large margin.

RTVE, Spain’s public broadcaster, and VRT, the Flemish broadcasting company, are demanding that organisers investigate the televoting system, which allows voters at home to vote up to 20 times for a small cost charged to each vote by text or phone call.

...

The EBU confirmed that RTVE and VRT had been in contact and said it took the complaints “seriously”.

Martin Green, the director of Eurovision, said: “It is important to emphasise that the voting operation for the Eurovision Song Contest is the most advanced in the world and each country’s result is checked and verified by a huge team of people to exclude any suspicious or irregular voting patterns.”

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[–] Saleh@feddit.org 47 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would not go as far that manipulation is the only reasonable explanation. Certainly Israeli lobby groups will have mobilized their people to vote extensively as participation in international events and the image of strong support are crucial for claiming legitimacy. As the article discusses the system of allowing up to 20 votes per number is favoring the ferverous.

There is three considerations from my side that i think need to be cleared:

  1. There is allegations that Israel used targeted ads on social media to encourage people to vote. Imo. this should be banned and lead to disqualification if true, especially as the EBU keeps emphasizing that ESC would be unpolitical. Having a state or state aligned actor push adds for voting is an obvious contradiction. (leaving all the other obvious ones aside for the moment)
  2. It must be laid open, how many "original" votes where cast for each candidate in each country and how many were multiple votes. This mechanism should be tossed out anyways. Someone willing to spend more money does not make his or her vote worth more than anyone elses. There remains the issue of multiple phone numbers per person, but that only gets amplified by allowing 20 votes on each of these phone numbers.
  3. It mus be analyzed if there was direct manipulations and fake votes. If that turns out to be true, that should also be a disqualification and multi year ban for the participating broadcaster. This should be separate from questions of exclusion that should be mandated by the actions of the countries.
[–] You@feddit.org 20 points 22 hours ago

To add to your No 1:

I've heard from other people (who don't use a good AdBlocker) that they got shown ads for the Israeli song surrounding videos about Eurovision on YouTube. Someone also mentioned that in the ads he saw the song itself got advertised, it did not explicitly mention that it is a song from Israel. I use UBlockOrigin and therefore did not see these ads myself.

I don't care who does it - I think that blatant advertising should not be allowed. Other countries are already disadvantaged by the comparatively huge costs to partake in the song contest.