It's just so baffling how the ICJ have basically said they find Israhell to be committing a genocide, but they are still in this contest when Russia (rightfully) got pulled more or less immediately!

It's just not making ANY sense to me other than it has to do with their sponsorship at this point...

Fingers crossed the contract isn’t renewed this year and will end at 5 years. :/

RAI published the televote percentages

So maybe all we need to do is mention all the other countries in our song!

If you send a Finnish artist you will get 12 points from Finland.

What does getting this information mean though? Like, how can they prove that Israhell faked the votes when it just proves they got the points they were assigned by each Country etc..?

Can they find an unusual pattern from these results etc.. that will help get them disqualified or…?

56 minutes ago, Sour Candy said:

RAI published the televote percentages

I’ve said all along San Marino would demolish the Italian televote

I think they are looking for changes in the system, so that one person cannot vote for same performance 20 times. At least Yle framed it that way. Yle also wants to make televote more important for the results.

I doubt this process is going to do much other than give us stats lovers more to chew on. What would be really interesting is to know if, say, only the 1st vote from each user counted how that would change the results. But I very much doubt that information is held.

It only takes a small proportion of voters to be giving 20 votes to the same country while all the casual viewers are giving 1 or 2 to their favourites to heavily skew the results.

51 minutes ago, Tafty said:

What does getting this information mean though? Like, how can they prove that Israhell faked the votes when it just proves they got the points they were assigned by each Country etc..?

Can they find an unusual pattern from these results etc.. that will help get them disqualified or…?

Azerbaijan were investigated following 2013 and whilst they clearly did buy votes, EBU couldn’t find evidence and said there were “security measures” in place that would stop them doing it.

At the time the EBU then said there was a 3 year ban for anyone who did that. So I suppose in theory yes but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened here as Azerbaijan 2013. Again that was a song that wasn’t being charting across Europe, wasn’t being talked about, but randomly came 2nd over some of the favourites. I think that year the split results for the semis never emerged which is odd.

I agree that we need something like average number of votes for a country, but even then I’m not sure that proves that the votes were bought or whatever. It is against the spirit of the contest though for there to be mass voting by Zionists or whoever, because I have seen lots of tweets where people were bragging they voted tonnes of times on a SIM card registered to another country etc. So even if it’s not necessarily something they will ban (which they won’t), they should really look into how it can be stopped. Well, the easiest way to stop it they also won’t do lol and bending over backwards not to.

What is at least mildly encouraging (but still awful) is that it seems like Israel's percentages of the votes that have been made public was at least lower than last year (albeit in Italy because Tutta L'Italia is such a known song there already). But 11% instead of 35% of a vote still doesn't matter if everybody else is collecting scraps. Hopefully next year if Israel are still in it then their voters will have further moved on and the percentages will be down to 3-4% and more easily beatable by other songs.

New Day Will Rise's position of second was also massively flattered by the rest of the field being so weak and spread out. Israel's televote was at least lower than last year, and the total score was lower too than Hurricane despite the juries actually giving them more than last year. We really need a strong year next year with loads of big contenders (or of course, better yet, no Israel), this year was the most spread out the field has been on both voting metrics for nearly 15 years.

On 18/05/2025 at 18:11, Liam Sota said:

They need a way to put Ireland back on the main show regularly. For Luxembourg to be there and not Ireland is absurd.

could you elaborate on this please?

4 minutes ago, Colm said:

could you elaborate on this please?

I think he just means Ireland needs to find a way to qualify more regularly. 😅

5 minutes ago, Colm said:

could you elaborate on this please?

They’ve both won it numerous times yet Ireland is never there anymore as the geographical voting makes it much more unlikely for them to qualify. They should be there regularly

I do think with Ireland, UK, Germany, Spain, Australia et al there is a need for them to send a winner or they finish near the bottom/dont qualify

I do think the jury vote should come back to the semi finals for this reason (among others)

A jury wouldn’t have helped Ireland this time around

38 minutes ago, Liam Sota said:

They’ve both won it numerous times yet Ireland is never there anymore as the geographical voting makes it much more unlikely for them to qualify. They should be there regularly

This 'should' is opinion. I'm Irish and I can't think of a single example of when we should have qualified but didn't. Not even Brooke.

I’m happy with no jury in the semis. You don’t need something like Switzerland 2022 going through on jury votes because it’s technically competent only to bore everyone to tears on Saturday.

I think many of the Western nations and especially 4 of the Big 5 have struggled most of this century with what is our national identity and what are we bringing to this competition? In a sense it’s worst of all for the UK who have been responsible for so much of what everyone has listened to over the last 60 years. How can you stand out in that position? Italy and some other countries have been very skilful in making their entries just different enough year on year and yet keeping that national character running through. But that’s a discussion for another thread.

57 minutes ago, Colm said:

could you elaborate on this please?

My read of that post was that the competition should favour certain countries like Ireland and have them in the final automatically, perhaps because of their storied ESC history, unlike Luxembourg, which of course has an entirely irrelevant ESC history.

57 minutes ago, Liam Sota said:

They’ve both won it numerous times yet Ireland is never there anymore as the geographical voting makes it much more unlikely for them to qualify. They should be there regularly

Luxembourg is not particularly a country known for supportive neighbours though - yet they're managing to qualify just fine.

1 hour ago, Liаm said:

At the time the EBU then said there was a 3 year ban for anyone who did that. So I suppose in theory yes but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened here as Azerbaijan 2013. Again that was a song that wasn’t being charting across Europe, wasn’t being talked about, but randomly came 2nd over some of the favourites. I think that year the split results for the semis never emerged which is odd.

I agree that we need something like average number of votes for a country, but even then I’m not sure that proves that the votes were bought or whatever. It is against the spirit of the contest though for there to be mass voting by Zionists or whoever, because I have seen lots of tweets where people were bragging they voted tonnes of times on a SIM card registered to another country etc. So even if it’s not necessarily something they will ban (which they won’t), they should really look into how it can be stopped. Well, the easiest way to stop it they also won’t do lol and bending over backwards not to.

At this point it's almost certain that the public seeing the 2013 split results would reveal cheating that throws the entire results of that year into question - perhaps also indicating that the EBU should have according to their own rules banned Azerbaijan which then calls into question the following years also.

I wonder whether something akin to stripping medalists from sports athletes could ever happen. With a historical audit of long-past contests, and adjusting the official record to match. Clarity and attempts to protect the voting process from manipulation are absolutely needed though, and I'm pleased to see a handful of broadcasters taking first steps on this.