Previous to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final, it was announced that the Belarusian jury was dismissed due to the members revealing their votes after the first semi-final, which is against the rules and regulations set by the EBU. As a result, the voting partner, Digame created a substitute aggregated result, based on the results of the other countries with similar voting records which was then approved by the voting monitor, Ernst & Young. These votes were used in the Eurovision 2019 Grand Final.
This has proven to be problematic, with the EBU now releasing a statement:
‘The EBU can confirm, following standard review practices, we have discovered that due to a human error an incorrect aggregated result was used. This had no impact on the calculation of points derived from televoting across the 41 participating countries and the overall winner and Top 4 songs of the Contest remain unchanged.
To respect both the artists and EBU Members which took part, we wish to correct the final results in accordance with the rules. The correct jury points have now been added to the scoreboard and the revised totals for each participating broadcaster, and their country, have been published on Eurovision.tv
The EBU and its partners digame and Ernst & Young deeply regret that this error was not identified earlier and will review the processes and controls in place to prevent this from happening again.’
Here is the corrected result:
- Netherlands – 498 points
- Italy – 472 points
- Russia – 370 points
- Switzerland – 364 points
- Sweden – 334 points
- Norway – 331 points
- North Macedonia – 305 points
- Azerbaijan – 302 points
- Australia – 284 points
- Iceland – 232 points
- Czech Republic – 157 points
- Denmark – 120 points
- Cyprus – 109 points
- Malta – 107 points
- Slovenia – 105 points
- France – 105 points
- Albania – 90 points
- Serbia – 89 points
- San Marino – 77 points
- Estonia – 76 points
- Greece – 74 points
- Spain – 54 points
- Israel – 35 points
- Belarus – 31 points
- Germany – 24 points
- United Kingdom – 11 points
These changes mean that North Macedonia did win the jury vote rather than Sweden, although overall Sweden moved up a position, finishing in 5th. Norway moved down to 6th place, Azerbaijan to 8th place with North Macedonia moving up to 7th place.