Eurovision 2025 - After Thoughts

[RedToothBrush]

Austria's JJ won with Wasted Love

Qualifying quiz before you vote?

”How many backing singers did Latvia have?”
”What colour was the Danish singer’s outfit?”
“When does Sir Terry say you can drink?”

Oh gosh.

None?
Is it after the 10th?
It was a bit - ermm- tight. It was blue. Or red. She was blonde. But she wasn't Finnish.

And I couldn't even answer in the correct order!

I fail.

"what was the code onscreen in your country when your chosen act performed"

Obviously, anybody who votes for a song in a song contest when they had no interest in actually watching that song contest is a bad actor and deeply dishonest.

Why would you actually care who won a competition that didn't hold the most basic interest for you if you were genuine?

I have no interest whatsoever in football - no, not even if one of the UK home nations is in a big final - so I never actually watch it. Was the final result popular and the refereeing in any particular game fair? Not a clue and I couldn't care less; that's a matter for the people who are fans, clearly; it makes no difference in any way to me.

If somebody wants to set up an independent 'Which country do you like best?' contest, nobody is stopping them from organising it at all.

The article states exactly what I surmised - that Israeli state agencies produced and broadcast the ads I saw, in the US, on various platforms.

The EBU says it's not against the rules. I think it's time to make a rule.

I think the global voting issue and the potential to vote 'strategically' could be mitigated by weighting the votes coming from sexretly and randomly chosen countries, or by taking an average of the jury and public vote and leaving that as the final score.

Weighting random countries' votes could look like each vote from verified accounts in five secret, randomly chosen countries on Eurovision Final night (for example, Cyprus, Australia, France, Iceland, and Lithuania) counting for two votes and everyone else counting for one. The chances of manipulation of the unknown randoms would be small (never zero, but small).

Overall, though, I think opening voting to the global audience is a huge part of the issue.

In particular, I think opening voting to US voters is problematic even from the pov of musical taste.

In 2025 it is remarkably easy to spot an attempts to game a voting system.

There was no gaming of the system. Israel got as many votes as it did because real people bothered to vote for them.

People like me, who are not Jewish but might have thought it was the best song (it's the only one that was an ear worm for me) others might have voted because they found the Singer's story inspiring (which is why many people voted for Chris McC in Strictly this year - I personally didn't think he was the best dancer, so didn't, but I didn't throw a strop because most people voted that way.)

Some people might have voted for Israel for political reasons, such is Eurovision, its always been that way, nothing has changed, it's just that Israel is the country that the loudest critical voices currently choose to hate. I think most ordinary people just make up their own minds.

Do Israel really REALLY want to win? Can they afford the expense of hosting the competition, or would they/could they pay another country to host on their behalf?

Despite the war, Israel is still reasonably wealthy, no? The issue would be more safety and wiling ness of singers and audience to go.

JJ has made a statement saying he doesn’t want Israel to be able to compete next year but that it’s an EBU decision. They won’t like their winner getting political just a few days after winning.
https://x.com/eurovisionnewz/status/1925267548838228353?s=61

From this article Belgium seem to have strong evidence that not all those voting can have watched the show: “Belgium’s broadcaster VRT provided data to community news site Songfestival.be which also appeared to show a disparity between numbers of viewers and voters. Their statistics indicated that the number of votes cast from Belgium had increased from 1.3m in 2023, to 2m in 2024 and then 2.2m in 2025. However, the show had only about half as many viewers in 2025 as in 2023, as Belgium did not make the final.”

“Israeli government social media channels have been encouraging people to vote for its representative the maximum 20 times permitted. The Israeli embassy in London posted to social media during the final, encouraging people to vote 20 times for Raphael.”

“The Israeli marketing appears to encourage people to submit multiple votes without even having listened to the song or watched the show. This is not currently against Eurovision’s rules.”

it may not be against the rules but it’s hardly what the televote is designed for. And it very nearly gave the ESC a massive loss of credibility by Israel winning. And that would also have been a massive security headache for next year.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/may/21/eurovision-public-vote-israeli-near-win-social-media-campaigns

Yes to this. People voted and some have not liked the results. Including some broadcasters o/s

Yes the EBU say the system wasn’t gamed - well when the rules allow any number from anywhere to vote 20 times from each number the definition of “gamed’ is moot. They have also confirmed Israeli government were running advertising campaigns. So technically their probably wasn’t a breach but the spirit of the competition seems to have been.

There will always be some countries benefitting from cultural diaspora votes - we see it not just for Israel but between the Scandinavian countries which share a lot of movement, between some East European countries, famously between Greece and Cyprus etc. None of this is new. A government backed aggressive campaign targeting their diaspora vote and exhorting them to support one singer is new to me.

I don’t buy it all came from sympathy votes either. Chris McC undoubtedly got a sympathy vote but I doubt that would have been enough if he hadn’t also been a good dancer. Other disabled dancers have exited quite early. Other singers in Eurovision had massively challenging backstories which as pp say were mentioned in their videos. What they didn’t have was government backed and carefully targeted campaigns playing up the diaspora kinship rather than the quality of the song.

I would like to see a breakdown of the voting not just by region but by the patterns of voting eg proportion of numbers for each contestant which sent eg >15 votes for one contestant which which contestants benefitted most from those bulk votes. If there was no gaming or impact of aggressive advertising impact, that should be apparent in the detail voting patterns.

I also think 20 votes per number is an invitation to misuse and 1-3 votes should be the maximum per registered phone number.

I think you ‘need’ to be able to vote for up to 10 countries and then you can hope to influence more of the points that your county sends. It makes sense to me that individuals could rank their top 10 and send in their vote that way but lots of people wouldn’t want to do that as it would be time consuming. Maybe three or five songs in order would be the best compromise.

Am I right in thinking lots of countries vote by app?

(I am part of the problem maybe as I watch but don’t vote!)

Also in the UK we can just vote once for 15p and feel part of it. 20 votes is £3 which is a bit steep if you are not that invested. How would the charge if they made everyone vote the same number of times?

In Switzerland voting by app costs 1.20chf a vote. That’s about a £1 a vote.
You have to link the app account to your credit card. I didn’t vote because I was too lazy to enter my details and too mean to pay for the votes. But some people would have had a stronger motivation.

Presumably, if you're so minded to flood one particular country with a very high number of votes, you could easily spoof multiple phone numbers, or use lots of dynamic IP addresses and/or VPNs if online voting is allowed in your/any country, so not difficult to get around the rules.

Interesting Reddit from 2024 on cost of voting - UK nearly the cheapest!

https://www.reddit.com/r/eurovision/comments/1coz5j2/voting_charges/

Without wanting to derail, I'm sure I read years ago that a TV channel in South Africa showed the a whole run of Big Brother from the UK - some time after it had all run its course and finished in Britain - and they made plenty of money from getting viewers phoning in to vote for whom they wanted to stay/go, making out that it was still happening live!

And yet despite the votes costing much more in Switzerland, Israel still won the public vote there.

I think the number of votes each number can make needs to be significantly reduced. If analysis showed that the voting accounts voting for Israel generally made 20 votes while voting accounts not voting for Israel averaged 4 votes then that’s evidence to support reducing the number of votes allowed from 20 to 4. Yes a country could still try to influence the win but, if every person deciding to help do that could only vote 4 times, then you need a lot more people to get on board which is harder to achieve. Then Israel might have got a lot of 5-8 points from public votes rather 12 points.

Does anybody know why we can't vote online? The BBC is normally at the forefront of tech - it seems very odd for one of the largest western countries not to offer it.

Is it down to security concerns, maybe?

This sounds reasonable.

The whole population of Iceland is probably smaller than the Polish diaspora in the UK, so it will be impossible to mitigate it entirely, and I'd hate not to be able to vote for multiple countries.

I have no problem not being able to vote multiple times for the same act.

@Choux That’s a very sensible suggestion but I fear they won’t make that change as they’re making money from all of these votes.

I made 10 votes in total, 6 of which were my kids’.