Yle calls for Eurovision voting reform after public backlash

By admin On May 19, 2025

Audience observe counting the votes in the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 in Basel, Switzerland, on May 18, 2025. Photo: Heikki Saukkomaa / Lehtikuva

Finnish broadcaster Yle intends to raise concerns with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) over the Eurovision Song Contest’s current voting rules, following controversy around public voting in this year’s final.

Yle’s Head of Entertainment Juha Lahti said the broadcaster would ask the EBU to consider updating rules that allowed a single viewer to vote up to 20 times during the final.

“We will be asking the EBU whether it is time to revise the rules or at least review whether the current system opens the door to abuse,” Lahti told Yle. “It’s something we’ve been discussing in Finland for a while.”

The issue came into focus after Israel received the most points from the public vote, bolstered by online campaigns urging viewers to cast all 20 votes for the country’s entry. Israel’s representative Yuval Raphael appeared in multilingual video appeals before the final, asking fans to vote repeatedly.

Israel received 297 public points, the highest of any country. Austria, the contest’s winner, received 178 public points. In Finland, Israel earned the second-highest share of public votes, behind Sweden.

While EBU rules allow both jury and public votes to carry equal weight, Lahti suggested that this balance should also be reconsidered. He referred to last year’s result, when Finland’s Käärijä won the public vote but lost overall due to jury scores.

“If public votes had carried more weight, Finland would have hosted Eurovision this year,” Lahti said.

In Finland’s national selection contest, Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu (UMK), the public vote accounts for 75 percent of the final result. Lahti said Eurovision should adopt a similar model if public voting is to have more impact, but added that doing so must come with tighter controls.

“If the public vote becomes more influential, we need to ask whether it makes sense for one person to cast 20 votes,” Lahti said.

Despite wider calls for Israel to be disqualified from the contest, Yle currently has no plans to challenge the country’s participation with the EBU. “We have no such plans. We’re doing the usual Eurovision review and will focus on preparing UMK,” Lahti said.

Israel’s participation has come under criticism as its military continues a large-scale ground operation in Gaza. Some campaigners have called for Finland to boycott the competition altogether.

Eurovision expert Anna Muurinen welcomed Yle’s intention to push for changes to the voting system. She criticised the influence of the national juries, which consist of five members per country and often produce divergent results.

“There was an absurd level of variation between jury scores this year. Why should five people have so much power?” Muurinen said.

She also called for limits on how many times each viewer can vote, suggesting that the current system may be a legacy of past commercial partnerships with telecom providers.

Muurinen warned that increasing the power of public votes without reforming campaign practices could lead to further problems, as large-scale efforts to influence voting have already begun to dominate the contest.

“It’s not in the spirit of Eurovision to open YouTube and see ads telling you to vote for me,” she said.

Muurinen believes that unless organisers intervene, the contest’s popularity could begin to decline.

“There’s no point in spending your own money to vote if it doesn’t count,” she said. “Eurovision is in a crisis, or heading into one.”

Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi