The Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, Martin Green has released an open letter following the Eurovision Song Contest 2025.
The days following the 69th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest has seen a large amount of debate in the press regarding the voting and results of the competition. Following the conclusion of the 2025 contest on Saturday, several broadcasters have contacted the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to request details of voting numbers.
RTVE of Spain, VRT of Belgium, RÚV of Iceland, Yle of Finland, RTÉ of Ireland and NRK of Norway have all raised questions regarding the voting at the contest. RTVSLO of Slovenia has called for a debate on whether Israel should still be allowed to compete. While AVROTROS and NPO in the Netherlands has raised queries regarding the current state of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Martin Green the Director of the Eurovision Song Contest has commented on these debates below and outlined the steps that will be discussed in the coming months. This includes conversations on lowering the number of votes a person can cast and limiting advertising for acts.
The letter reads:
Dear trusted and treasured Eurovision Song Contest community,
The EBU has listened to and engaged closely in the conversations among Members, our fans and in the media following this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).
I want to again congratulate the winner JJ and the team from ORF. His performance and song rightly, clearly and validly won the Contest and we want to make sure any ancillary conversations do not overshadow this epic achievement.
The ESC voting system includes multiple security layers and a comprehensive set of rules to ensure that a valid result is generated. Our voting partner – Once Germany GmbH – uses redundant systems and multiple platforms to ensure the correct delivery of votes to the central system.
For the Eurovision Song Contest, specially designed systems are used to monitor and prevent fraud. Additionally, more than 60 individuals in Cologne and several others in Vienna and Amsterdam monitor the voting process in each country and maintain direct contact with telecommunication and broadcasting partners globally. All results are verified through an 8-eye principle by the CEO and senior employees of Once, who collectively have over 40 years of voting experience.
Independent compliance monitor EY oversees and authenticates the results. Every decision related to the outcomes is documented and assessed. The entire process, including the result calculation of the platform and the voting results is thoroughly reviewed and verified by EY.
All audience voting, be it SMS, call or online shows evidence of the motivation of communities or diasporas around certain contestants. This can be for many reasons including personal attributes, back stories, geographic affiliations and current affairs. Historically the ESC has been as open to this as other singing and music competitions and reality television.
Every year the Reference Group for the Contest, which contains representatives from and acts on behalf of our Members, studies the data provided by our voting partner Once to make recommendations of any actions available to us to ensure our rules and systems remain fail safe and take into account contemporary external factors such as advances in technology and external influences. This process will happen as it always does in June this year.
Alongside the discussions of the Reference Group, one aspect the EBU will be looking at is the promotion of our acts by their delegations and associated parties. Such promotion is allowed under our rules and acts to celebrate the artists, increase their profile and launch future careers – it’s very much part of the music industry – but we want to ensure that such promotion is not disproportionally affecting the natural mobilization of communities and diasporas we see in all entertainment audience voting.
Another example is the number of votes we allow per person – 20 per payment method. This is designed to ensure that audiences of all ages can vote for more than one of their favourite songs and there is no current evidence that it disproportionally effects the final result – but the question has been asked and so we will look at it.
The EBU and I will be, as we always do, engaging our Members for their views on this and other matters.
I’ll end as I began, by congratulating JJ and ORF who won the Eurovision Song Contest 2025.
Image source: Daniel Stridh | Source: Eurovision.tv
