EBU on the voting fraud allegations

Yes folks, its that time of the year again, where the EBU deny everything, that there is no bloc voting or fraud going on in the voting system for the contest. They should make this an annual event, what is this the 4th one now?

With over a week gone since the Eurovision Song Contest in Serbia, many media reports and spectators around Europe have criticised the Eurovision Song Contest for the apparent neighbourly and diaspora voting affecting the outcome of the contest, but Director of Eurovision TV, Bjørn Erichsen, speaking on behalf of the EBU, spoke to respond to such allogations.

He said that "if a viewer likes the song from a neighbouring country, they can vote for it, and if a Polish girl lives in Ireland she can vote for Poland. You cannot vote for your own country, from your own country. But the EBU and its partners do not - and should not have - any possibility of controlling the nationality, identity or preferences of the individual voter. If somebody were to seek to influence the voters to vote for a specific song, they would have to approach the 105 million audience to convince them. Ultimately, they would have to influence the entire potential 640 million audience in the EBU countries, as nobody knows who will switch on their TV that evening." Right, so in plain English, he doesn't seem to care that Countries are voting for their neighbours and actually affecting the outcome. There is a high population of Eastern Europeans in the West who are odviously going to vote for their own country while the people who are living at home are going to vote for their neighbours.

A comment by one of the visitors to ESC Today summed it up for me - "If the EU countries had Russia as their favourite, it is because the EU now includes countries with huge Russian minorities/diaspora/sympathies: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece ... An average of 8 or 10 points from each of these would, alone, secure Russia more than 100 points!

If Western Europe had Armenia as their favourite song, it was NOT because the people of Western Europe preferred that song. It was because the very active Armenian diasporas of the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Israel, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey (etc., etc.) made sure their home country received 10 or 12 points from each of them.

The point is: With the present televoting system, and all countries voting in the final, it has become much easier for an Eastern European country to win (because they all have large diasporas and many friendly neighbours) than for a Western European country (which can rely only on an amazing song and performance). That is why the ESC will remain in the East/Balkans for years and years to come."

But we must all admit that since the Semi Finals and also the introduction of allowing all countries to vote (43 this year), the problem of voting seems to be getting worse, but Bjørn Erichsen surprising said that "This year, as in other years, Russia got good votes from their neighbours. In the past this was not enough to secure a win. The difference this year was that they received points from a total of 38 countries, thereby securing victory."

"If we imagine an absurd scenario where only the participating countries from the 27 EU countries could vote, thus excluding most of the direct Russian neighbours, the winner would also have been Russia. If we imagine - even more absurd - that only the pre-enlargement EU old Western countries could vote, the winner would have been Armenia - not a Western country. Voting for your neighbour was not, and has never been the reason a song wins. The statistics prove that you can only win, if almost all countries vote for you." The EBU has hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to audit the voting system and the results. In every contest to date, the EBU has found any criticism of the voting systems unfounded.

Reading Oikotimes, they claim that "some statisticians have judged that the narrow victory of Sertab Erener for Turkey over Belgium in 2003 was most likely decided by diaspora voting. We cannot prove whether Sertab would have claimed victory without the assistance of ‘gastarbeiter’ Turks in western Europe, It is unlikely that the 42 point winning margin of Dima Bilan this year was built only by ‘neighbourly’ voting; as Erichsen rightly says, points need to be collected from virtually all countries for a winner to be chosen. However, the point Erichsen seems to be missing is that while the winning nation may win regardless, the positions of many nations in final result tables may vary quite strongly as a result of the scores awarded from a few other countries. Therefore, millions of viewers around Europe watch the scores announced, noting results which seem ‘interesting’ compared to the rest. Whether their country benefits or suffers as a result of ‘interesting’ scoring, viewers can’t help but be perturbed by its presence."

Examples of ‘interesting’ voting this year include Bulgaria’s offering of 12 points to Germany’s total of 14 points. Can the EBU claim that this was due to a Bulgarian liking for the song, or would it be more that one of No Angels is Bulgarian, well known to Bulgarian TV viewers as a Bulgarian Idol judge? Did the Irish public genuinely consider the Polish entry to be the second best song this year? Or would the EBU acknowledge that the 10 points awarded were mostly likely due to the large guest-worker Polish population exercising a ‘home-vote’ irrespective of the quality of the song and its performance? In addition, could the EBU claim that countries with large diasporas in many other European nations (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Turkey, Armenia) do not have some advantage over those who don’t have significant diasporas (e.g. Switzerland, Iceland, Belgium)?

I have to admit, the voting this year was dead boring and so predictable, they may as well have just announced the winner, would have saved us an hour and a half of our life. Just in case Bjørn Erichsen has not overwhelmed you with his bad attempt to reassure us, Eurovision.tv released a video entitled "Eurovision Song Contest: You make it happen" about Russia winning the contest and the voting.



What is funny about this video is that half way during the video it asks "Can I vote for my friend" and the reply is "Yes". So even though my neighbouring countries song i.e. United Kingdom, might be terrible, I can vote for it, and even if my best friend lives in Norway, and the countries song is terrible, I will vote for Norway because my friend lives there, so thats where I have been going wrong all these years, voting for the song instead of the country!


Also the video shows the banner I made for my blog above, you can see the banner at 0:16 in the video.