Following the Eurovision Song Contest 2025, questions have been raised around the televote and the potential for individuals to vote more than twenty times. How could this be accomplished? What questions are being asked by National Broadcasters? And what does this mean for the future of the Song Contest?
Casting Multiple Votes Through The ESC App
The introduction of the Rest Of The World saw an overhaul of the televoting system by Once, the EBU’s voting partner, using the credit card number as a unique identifier. Its website notes that “the 2023 edition of Eurovision posed new challenges as we expanded the voting system to accommodate a global audience.”
So, how easy is it to cast multiple votes through the ESC.vote website and Eurovision app in this new system?
Inside the app, you select the nation from which you are voting and enter your chosen performer to vote for (up to a maximum of twenty votes, as per broadcast and website claims). Votes are purchased by paying with a bank card for the selected country.
However, you could repeat the same process by simply entering a new bank card number each time for another twenty votes.
To illustrate this, during the 2025 Grand Final, two people undertaking this method could make a total of 160 votes recorded using eight separate bank cards owned personally by them over a period of five minutes. The votes were made in the main for the same subset of countries, not a wider selection. This was also done without any change of device, IP, VPN, location or email address during the process, and each time they received the recorded message from the artist and a receipt of payment to show that the votes were received.
References to voting procedures across the Eurovision presence repeatedly state “Viewers can submit their vote by phone call, SMS or via the official app. They can vote up to 20 times.” Spanish broadcaster RTVE’s on-air statements following the Grand Final pointed to “current voting rules enabling each viewer to cast up to 20 votes per device or credit card.” Given this, the system appears open to manipulation if one is motivated to do so.
EBU Responds To Voting Questions
Speaking to the EBU’s Eurovision News Spotlight (a collaborative network for fact-checking), Martin Green CBE, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, said:
“Our voting partner Once has confirmed that a valid vote was recorded in all countries participating in this year’s Grand Final and in the Rest of the World. The voting operation for the Eurovision Song Contest is the most advanced in the world and each country’s result is checked and verified by a huge team of people to exclude any suspicious or irregular voting patterns. An independent compliance monitor reviews both jury and public vote data to ensure we have a valid result.
“The Eurovision Song Contest’s rules are designed to ensure a fair and neutral competition. These rules do not prohibit participating broadcasters or third parties such as record labels or others from promoting their entries online and elsewhere, as long as such promotion does not instrumentalize the Contest or breach its editorial guidelines. Many delegations employ paid promotion campaigns to support the song, profile, and future careers of their artists.”
More Questions Are Being Asked
We should note that following the completion of voting, an ESC Insight writer contacted the EBU, disclosing the experience of casting more than twenty votes.
ESC Insight has also approached the EBU requesting the percentage of rejected televotes by the Pan European Response Platform developed by the EBU and its voting partner, Once, and the percentage of rejected televotes by any other method.
We will update this article with any reply.
Questions From EBU Members
Several broadcasters have asked the EBU for further details on the televoting from the Eurovision Song Contest 2025. According to the national newspaper El Pais, Spanish broadcaster RTVE has requested a full breakdown of the televote:
“The initial information the Spanish delegation received was a list of the countries with the most votes, without specifying the number of votes received by each of them… After insisting on more precise data, RTVE obtained a new document sent by the festival’s organizing body, which only indicates that, on the night of the grand final, it received 7,283 calls, 23,840 text messages, and 111,565 online votes.”
Belgian broadcaster VRT, speaking to songfestival.be, summarised voting details from Eurovision 2023, 2024, and 2025.
“During this year’s edition in Basel, the differences are even more extreme. Not only was the final watched proportionally less than the semi-final with Red Sebastian (910,000 vs 660,000), suddenly almost ten times as many votes were received in the final, a whopping 220,554 in total.
As for the discrepancy in the changes between the audience numbers and the voting numbers: “’We currently have no insight into it’, the [VRT] spokesperson said in a written response to Songfestival.be. “Nor do the Netherlands or Spain. We are currently inquiring about this.”
Dutch broadcasters AVROTROS and NPO have gone further, expanding on the televote issues in a statement about the wider question of the Contest’s famously apolitical stance, a translation of which reads:
“AVROTROS and NPO strongly value the apolitical and unifying character of the Eurovision Song Contest. However, we observe that the event is increasingly being influenced by social and geopolitical tensions. Israel’s participation confronts us with the question of to what extent the Song Contest still truly functions as an apolitical, unifying, and cultural event. We want to raise this question, together with other countries, for discussion within the EBU.’
By doing so, the Dutch broadcaster lays out the broad issues that EBU will need to address this summer, both privately and publicly, over the summer months.
Why Is This Important?
As the Eurovision Song Contest looks forward to its seventieth birthday, it has been in the mainstream news not for the success of JJ, the impressive show, or even the post-contest song success on streaming services. It is being called out for allowing an unfair voting system, national governments stating that countries (and by extension, the national broadcasters) should be banned, and the supposedly apolitical contest is becoming intensely politicised.
Following Malmö 2024, the EBU commissioned a detailed examination of the Song Contest, with many results published. This resulted in several positive changes in the organisation and the running of the Contest, including the Code of Conduct for media and increased facilities for artist welfare.
We now need a full review of the voting system.