This was unprecedented! Four days after the 2019 Eurovision Grand Final, which saw The Netherlands take the trophy back home after 44 years, the EBU released an official statement, announcing that a human error was the cause of an incorrect aggregated result from the Belarusian national jury. Thus, several countries received other final placings than their actual ones, while the overall voting score of most entries has now changed!
A little before Saturday’s final, the EBU announced that the Grand Final results of the Belarusian jury would be dismissed, as the panel’s members had revealed their ranking during the first semi-final, which is – of course – in contrary to the competition’s rules.
Hence, and as set out in the regulations, the set of 1 to 8, 10 and 12 points awarded by the country during the jury voting was determined based on the results of other countries with similar voting records. However, the points were accidentally given out to the 10 countries with the lowest average score (positions 17 to 26), instead of the emerging Top 10. If this would not have happened, we would see North Macedonia win the jury vote, while Sweden would end up within the overall Top 5. There has not been any influence on the televoting results because of this error.
Here’s the EBU’s announcement and below you may find the Grand Final’s actual results:
The EBU can confirm, following standard review practices, we have discovered that due to a human error an incorrect aggregated result was used. This had no impact on the calculation of points derived from televoting across the 41 participating countries and the overall winner and Top 4 songs of the Contest remain unchanged.
To respect both the artists and EBU Members which took part, we wish to correct the final results in accordance with the rules. The correct jury points have now been added to the scoreboard and the revised totals for each participating broadcaster, and their country, have been published on eurovision.tv.
The EBU and its partners digame and Ernst & Young deeply regret that this error was not identified earlier and will review the processes and controls in place to prevent this from happening again.
Belarus’ awarded set during the jury voting was:
- Israel – 12 points
- Estonia – 10 points
- Germany – 8 points
- Norway – 7 points
- Spain – 6 points
- United Kingdom – 5 points
- San Marino – 4 points
- Serbia – 3 points
- Iceland – 2 points
- Australia – 1 point
While the correct one is as follows:
- Malta – 12 points
- North Macedonia – 10 points
- Cyprus– 8 points
- Italy – 7 points
- The Netherlands – 6 points
- Azerbaijan – 5 points
- Switzerland – 4 points
- Greece – 3 points
- Sweden – 2 points
- Russia – 1 point
2019 Grand Final corrected scoreboard
Countries in bold are these whose final placings have changed. Countries in green have now achieved higher placings with the corrected scoreboard, while those in red can be found in lower positions.
- The Netherlands (498 points) – Winner
- Italy (472 points)
- Russia (370 points)
- Switzerland (364 points)
- Sweden (334 points)
- Norway (331 points)
- North Macedonia (305 points)
- Azerbaijan (302 points)
- Australia (284 points)
- Iceland (232 points)
- Czech Republic (157 points)
- Denmark (120 points)
- Cyprus (109 points)
- Malta (107 points)
- Slovenia (105 points)
- France (105 points)
- Albania (90 points)
- Serbia (89 points)
- San Marino (77 points)
- Estonia (76 points)
- Greece (74 points)
- Spain (54 points)
- Israel (35 points)
- Belarus (31 points)
- Germany (24 points)
- United Kingdom (11 points)