The European Broadcasting Union, which runs Eurovision, in a press release published Thursday evening condemned “fraud of an unprecedented scale” involving six countries that may have tried to manipulate the results of the 2022 edition of the contest.

Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino have given themselves the most points in the second semi-final held in Torino on May 12, according to the statement.

“It was observed that four out of six juries placed the other five countries in their top 5 (taking into account the fact that a jury cannot vote for its own country)”, may we read in the text . “An irregularity of this magnitude is unprecedented. [dans l’histoire du concours]”, says the EBU again.

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The irregularity was discovered by the Independent Voting Monitor, a participant in the competition, a pan-European organization. The organization found that many of the suspected six countries were poorly liked by the 15 other voting countries, which placed them at the bottom of the rankings.

The votes of these six countries were annulled by the organization of the contest and replaced by the top 10 calculated with an algorithm determined by regulation in the event of irregular votes.

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Vote for “Balley”

The day after Ukraine’s victory, Romania denounced another problem, which occurred during the final. The Romanians assured that their vote was “replaced” by a vote for Ukraine. He confirmed to Romanian public television TVR last Sunday that the points he intended for Moldova were attributed to Ukraine.

“We were very surprised to learn that the vote did not count in the final standings, with the organizers giving the contestants in the final another round of ratings,” TVR wrote in a statement. “We specify that the Romanian jury has decided to award the maximum points to the representatives of Moldova,” she explained.

Ukraine won the competition in Italy ahead of the United Kingdom and Spain, thanks to audience votes who voted for the group representing the country invaded by Russian troops since late February.

Original article published on BFMTV.com