- Voting cap halved for 2026, encouraging fans to spread support across more entries
- Professional juries return to Semi-Finals with expanded, more diverse panels including young jurors aged 18–25
- Enhanced technical safeguards to detect and block coordinated or fraudulent voting activity
- disproportionate promotion campaigns, particularly those of affiliated third parties, such as governments (cough Israel cough) are now prohibited
Well, gee.
Reducing the number of votes per phone number or credit card to 10 from 20? I guess we’ll just have to generate twice as many through the SaaS we use to vote.
I didn’t see the sponsors for this year, but I assume Moroccan oil is still the main one. So, of course they’ll do everything to favor Israel.
No need to jump to conspiracy theories, the truth is bad enough.
There is no evidence that actively fraudulent votes where submitted for Israel in the last two years. All their votes where cast by real people, eligible to vote, without them having received any direct compensation. The scenario implied by you did not happen.
What did happen last year was a massive advertising campaign by the Israeli government, activating people sympathetic to Israels cause but did not watch the show. All of this was highly unethical on so many levels but did not violate the rules as they where then.
As for Morrocan Oil, there again is no evidence, that they as sponsor had any influence on the politics of participation at the contest.
Why must everything on the internet immediately be the worst version of the thing ever? Israel uses the contest to sportswash their numerous and various war crimes. Morrocan oil is accused of operating factories in illegally occupied territory (though last time I checked, I couldn’t find any proof of that claim. If someone can provide it, I would be genuinely interested). Isn’t that enough to disqualify the country?
They talk about revisions to the Voting Instructions and Code of Conduct - but are these documents public? Can we actually read these regulations somewhere, what they say word for word?
“any attempts to unduly influence the results will lead to sanctions” sounds good at least.
“For the 2026 Contest, the maximum number of votes per payment method (online, SMS and phone call) will be reduced from 20 to 10.”
Thats also good to prevent campaigns from going “just vote 20 times for our artist” and gives such efforts less impact.
Juries in the semi finals is always a tricky topic, there was a good reason why they were removed in the first place. We’ll have to see I guess.
Juries in the semi finals is always a tricky topic, there was a good reason why they were removed in the first place. We’ll have to see I guess.
Why was that? I didn’t even know they’d been removed. Just assumed the jury was involved at every stage
Jury voting was taken out of the Eurovision semi‑finals (from 2023 onward) mainly to strengthen the contest’s integrity after a jury‑rigging scandal in 2022 and to make qualification depend purely on the public’s taste.
In Eurovision 2022, six countries’ jury votes were annulled in Semi‑Final 2 and in the Grand Final after “irregular voting patterns” showed they had systematically ranked each other unnaturally high, which the EBU treated as coordinated cheating.
Interesting. I remember that scandal, but I guess I missed what the outcome of that was.
It’s also funny (and annoying) that I didn’t know I could have voted in the semis… I’m still kind of upset that Australia didn’t make it to the final with milkshake man
The new code of conduct is not online as of now. The old one can be accessed here: https://eurovision.tv/rules/codeofconduct
I assume they’ll replace it in the next couple of weeks with the new one
Or they could not let Israel use it for genocide propaganda…
Whether or not Israel gets to compete gets decided at the next EBU general assembly in a couple of weeks. This is just the reference group updating the rules for the contest itself.
And totally unrelated to Israel’s actions last year to use Eurovision as propaganda.
All sensible options. Last item still open to debate imo though. No government should be promoting it, memberhsip of the EBU is from broadcasters and not governments!
Damn, and I was so looking forward to the 2027 Eurovision from the Trump City Gaza casino complex… (The most opulent Eurovision ever!)
Those seem like reasonable changes.
