Romanian broadcaster TVR has accused the European Broadcasting Union of assigning a different set of scores to the ones they provided, incorrectly giving the highest score to Ukraine, which went on to win the competition.
The Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra easily won the competition, finishing on 631 points, with the United Kingdom in second place with 466 points.
However, despite the margin of victory, the official Romanian Eurovision representatives complained that the EBU ignored their vote to give Moldova first place and instead awarded it to Ukraine.
“We were surprised to discover that the result of the Romanian jury’s vote was not taken into account in the calculation of the final ranking,” said TVR in a statement. “The organizers assigned a different set of points to the participants of the final, on behalf of the jury of our country. We specify that the Romanian jury decided to give maximum score to the representatives of Moldova.”
Representatives of each country also normally appear on the live broadcast to announce their country’s voting results, but Romania’s Eda Marcus was nowhere to be seen.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) responded by claiming they had noticed “irregular voting patterns” which “forced them to replace scores from six countries: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino.”
“In order to comply with the voting instructions of the competition, the EBU collaborated with its voting partner to calculate a replacement aggregate result for each country concerned, both for the second semi-final and for the grand final (calculated on the basis of the results of other countries with a similar voting history),” they said in a statement.
In the final vote tally, neither Romania or Moldova awarded any points to each other, something that would never happen in reality.
TVR said Eurovision organizers had “replaced the jury score in Romania with a ‘substitute’ calculated in a non-transparent way,” and had not even informed them of what they were doing during the competition.
Although part of the vote is also down to the viewing public, the claims suggest that there may have been some chicanery behind the scenes to ensure Ukraine won the competition, thereby fulfilling a preset narrative to support ‘the current thing’.
The Eurovision Song Contest is notoriously political and has been beset by similar voting scandals in the past.
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