Eurovision Vote Rigging
The Trouble With Voting
Here’s a thing…. Voting in the Eurovision contest takes two forms, the Country Vote and the Public Vote.
In the Country Vote a so called expert panel in each of the 27 countries sit in a champagne fuelled meeting (allegedly) and discuss which 26 of the wild and wacky songs they have just been subject to are the least worst. 26 because they can’t vote for themselves.
Once that’s done, they are called in turn to announce their point scoring and by the end of a very long series of phone calls we have a winner… sort of.
This is all well structured and other than the usual European cross border political voting (i.e. UK always gives France 10 points because we don’t like them that much and France always gives the UK 0 points because they don’t like us that much) it’s fairly robust if not predictable.
Then comes the horror of the great Public Vote…..
My Phone Doth Ringeth
Here in Great Western Land, the landline phones are by and large quiet. It is regarded as ‘Old Hat’ to use such a thing. Yes the ‘contrivance for distant conversation’ has been replaced by the ubiquitous mobile phone. Your host though, does posses an old fashioned contrivance which includes a telephone answering machine thingy. The idea being that should I not be here, the caller can leave a voicemail (another ‘Old Hat’ thing) for me to listen to at my convenience.
In the week or two before the great Battle of Eurovision 2021, the landline phone rang many times and upon being answered by me or the answerphone, the call cleared.
Odd you’d think but wait…
Hacker: “What do we do with this old Russian kit?”
There are many less well written (than this) conspiracy theories that suggest a major world power (or two.. no three) let’s say ‘Players’ out there who have wanted to have a hand in the result of some vote or other. Whether it’s getting Trump in (allegedly) or out (allegedly) or the UK in/out of Europe (allegedly). These guys have been at it for years and they probably need to train a new batch of bored locked-down teenagers how to carry on their not-so-valiant work.
Armed with second hand general/presidential vote rigging equipment these teens probably set about their business… of course allegedly. In their “How to hack a phone vote 101” class one hapless student must have not used the “test number” but that of the landline of your host!
Irrefutable Evidence
The strength of this vote rigging conspiracy is of course only as good as the supporting evidence which is as follows:-
- Landline receives many calls from similar numbers over two week period
- When manually answered or answered by answerphone, call clears
- Eurovision has a totally unexpected result
- Landline receives no calls (it still works) after Eurovision
Proved beyond doubt that there was some skulduggery in Eurovision…
