{"id":957041,"date":"2026-05-13T12:46:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T12:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/957041\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T12:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T12:46:19","slug":"eurovision-boss-were-watching-the-voting-very-carefully","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/957041\/","title":{"rendered":"Eurovision boss: ‘We’re watching the voting very carefully’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Questions were raised over last year’s results after Israel topped the public vote despite getting only 60 points from the national juries, who award separate scores based on a song’s compositional merits.<\/p>\n

Israel received 83% of its points from the public, while the winner, Austria, got just 41%.<\/p>\n

Media reports said an Israeli government advertising agency paid for online adverts and encouraged social media users to back the Israeli song, showing them how to vote up to the maximum 20 times.<\/p>\n

The EBU said it had found no evidence of irregularities – but in November, it approved new rules that included halving the vote limit to 10, and discouraging “disproportionate promotion campaigns” carried out by third parties, including governments.<\/p>\n

It has also made it mandatory for people voting online to provide credit card details to ensure that votes genuinely originate from the country in which they are submitted.<\/p>\n

Jury votes have also returned to the semi-final stages of the contest. They had previously been dropped when it was discovered that six juries had traded votes<\/a> at the 2022 contest in Turin, Italy.<\/p>\n

Despite that, Green said he had confidence in the integrity of the current system.<\/p>\n

“We are very consistent,” he said. “We have one of the best voting systems for the public in the world. It is fair, it is true, it’s secure.<\/p>\n

“People can try and do what they like. They’re not going to [influence] anything.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Questions were raised over last year’s results after Israel topped the public vote despite getting only 60 points…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":957042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-957041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116567342359382657","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/957042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}