The news are all over the place. According to Lithuanian online paper 15 min agents have paid people to vote for Azerbaijan in Lithuania as well as a number of other countries in order to improve their Eurovision result.
The proof is hard to verify and some people claim that the shows footage is staged and only made to slander the successful Azeri entries, but this excellent piece by 12points.tv show quite a few disturbing tendencies in the patterns of what countries vote extensively for Azerbaijan. Let's just say it doesn't look good.
There have also been equally unconfirmed rumours about other countries performing the same stunt - Russia has been named - in order to do well in the voting.
I see these allegations and get the same resigned feeling I had back in the years 1994-2002, another period with extensive trading of points - a standard that obviously upset the flow of points and most probably altered the final results considerably.
I remember sitting on the plane back home after the 2002 final in Tallinn, marking on the scoreboard every given point that seemed suspicious. After a while, having realised just how much trading had been going on, I just had to ask myself if there was any point to keep organising a contest as rigged as this one.
When Digame took over the supervision of televotes, things started to look better for several years but now the voting is beginning to leave a bad taste. Again.
I suggest the EBU investigates the situation properly and then sit down to have a hard think how to make the voting credible again. Eurovision - already tainted with rumours and allegations of being political and unfair - can not afford to have a voting that will upset the audiences.
The Eurovision Song Contest is just a light-hearted little game for the whole family. Strictly speaking the outcome is not important to the world as such.
But every light-hearted game - be it Trivial Pursuit, mini golf or Eurovision - has one thing in common. If some of the players start breaking the rules and cheat, then nobody will enjoy the game and nobody will want to play anymore.
Cheating kills the fun. So somebody better do something about this. At once.
