- 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
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.
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