The song contest organization found irregularities in jury results in six countries. The results for those countries were thus replaced by an alternative result. As a result, the final result took a little longer last night.

The European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the festival, has not announced which countries it is interested in. It also wasn’t clear exactly what was suspicious about the results.

The EBU says only that irregularities were found at the second semi-final rehearsal. For that preliminary round and final battle, an alternative scoring system was used, based on countries with similar voting behavior.

“The European Broadcasting Union takes the suspicion of manipulation of the Eurovision Song Contest very seriously,” the organization said in a press release. “It is our right to ignore such votes regardless of whether the result will affect the final result or not,” he added.

Statistically unlikely

This is not the first time that the result of a song contest has been interfered with due to unexpected results. In 2014, the score was replaced by Georgia, because all judges awarded the same song with the most points. Since that was statistically impossible, the EBU assumed that the agreements about the desired winner were made illegally.

A year later, two countries, Montenegro and Macedonia, were reprimanded for allowing their votes to be entirely determined by the public. Festival rules state that half of the points are awarded by a jury of experts.

Either way, the punishment had no consequences for the end result.