Spanish
The Eurovision Song Contest will review the current policy of allowing twenty televotes per person, as well as the support campaigns of the participants by their delegations, in light of the controversy raised this year by the high number of votes received by Israel.
Campaigns are in principle allowed, according to the director of the Festival, Martin Green, who in an open letter added: "we want to ensure that they do not disproportionately affect the natural mobilization of communities and diasporas that we see in every public vote in the field of entertainment".
The twenty televotes per person "are designed so that the public of all ages can vote for more than one of their favorite songs, and there is currently no evidence that they disproportionately affect the final result", but the system will be studied as it has been questioned, the director added.
Faced with the requests to audit the televote presented by public televisions such as the Spanish RTVE, the Belgian VRT or several from Scandinavian countries, Green insisted that the voting system "includes multiple layers of security and a set of exhaustive rules to guarantee a valid result".
Both the company in charge of the voting, Once Germany GmbH, and the British auditing services firm Ernst & Young, which also collaborates with the festival, use advanced systems to prevent fraud, said the head of Eurovision.
"More than sixty people in Cologne (Germany) and others in Vienna and Amsterdam supervise the voting process in each country and maintain direct contact with telecommunications and broadcasting partners around the world," Green said in his letter, addressed to the "Eurovision community".
Green added that in the face of this, communities or diasporas in different countries may respond to various motivations for voting for some contestants or others, including geographical affinities and current affairs.
"Historically the Eurovision Song Contest has been as open to this as other song contests, music and reality TV shows," he assured.
The festival director took the opportunity to congratulate its recent winner, the Austrian JJ, who on Thursday stated in an interview with the Spanish newspaper "El País" that he hopes Israel will not participate in next year's edition. "His performance and his song justly, clearly, and validly won the contest, and we want to ensure that any parallel conversation does not overshadow this epic achievement," Green stated.
Although Israel held a discreet position in the betting odds and was only in fifteenth place after the jury vote, it was the country that achieved the most points in the televote, which lifted it to second place overall.
In addition to Spain, the televote awarded it 12 points in Germany, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, United Kingdom, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as in the popular vote grouped in "rest of the world", corresponding to the votes of the non-participating countries in the final and the semifinals.
