Hundreds of SMS votes in the Eurovision Song Contest 2021 not counted
Yesterday was the Eurovision Song Contest. Like every year you could vote for your favorite. And that’s where it goes wrong. An inventory of DroidApp shows that at least dozens of votes have been wrongly declared invalid.
Wrongful SMS votes rejected Eurovision Song Contest
Yesterday evening, the Netherlands was the proud host country of the Eurovision Song Contest 2021, the 65th edition. The competition was won by Italy, mainly due to the enormous amount of public votes. Viewers of the annual music festival could vote by SMS for the number 9090, as is possible every year. However, something seems to have gone wrong this year. Research and inventory by DroidApp shows that hundreds of SMS votes have been falsely declared invalid.
“Voting already ended”
On our own devices at the editorial office we were surprised this morning with the text; “Thanks for your participation. Unfortunately the voting has already ended ”. In our case, the relevant SMS messages were sent immediately upon opening the voting round, after the 26 performances. This means that the messages were sent just after 11:00 PM. Only hours later did we receive a response to our vote, stating that the voting had already ended.
Luke did receive a confirmation from the editorial team, the other was submitted after the closing, according to the automatic text message response. This while they are sent immediately after each other.
We are not alone, according to a tour of DroidApp. Colleagues in the editorial office have also experienced this, and dozens of SMS’ers also complain on social networks that their vote has been wrongly rejected. Screenshots show that the voters were simply on time to submit their vote. After all, the line was open for a long time.
It is difficult to say whether the lack of many Dutch voices could have influenced the final result of the Eurovision Song Contest 2021. This problem seems to have only occurred in the Netherlands. We have asked various parties, including the organization and various Dutch providers for a response. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg. We will update this article as soon as we have a response to this.
Update 10:20 am: T-Mobile says they have investigated it internally. There was no network malfunction at the provider. The cause therefore seems to lie with the voting company, according to T-Mobile. Not only customers with T-Mobile experienced these problems, customers of other providers such as KPN and Vodafone also experienced this.
Update 11:49 am: AVROTROS charges the AD to know that they are aware of the problem. There would still be a part that has no confirmation of the vote. AVROTROS tells the newspaper that it is awaiting a response from the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union.
Update 21:15: The EBU has stated to the AD that the problems that many people experienced yesterday with voting stem from a malfunction at a provider. They did not process their text messages on time. These votes have not been counted because they were received too late. The spokesperson also said that he regretted the disappointment, but the EBU was unable to verify this. It is not known which provider this is and whether all affected customers were connected to this provider.
Did you also receive the text message that your vote arrived too late? Be sure to let us know by leaving a comment below this post.
WTF !! But really wtf !!! Get a text message that I was late to vote…. It was not me! If this has happened to several and I fear that then the voices are not a fuck !!! And I was also scammed with 2 text messages at € 0.45 each !! So @Eurovision explain….? #Eurovision pic.twitter.com/M1ZhZERzkV
– Myrtle Damen (@MirteDamen) May 23, 2021
Well, I hope you don’t get charged for these texts – I voted on time but just received these “unfortunately…” texts. Wonder how many other people have experienced this? Nice evening but I think this is a real shame…! #Eurovision #eurovision pic.twitter.com/hi81az3aFW
– Rob Gainey (@ RobGainey1) May 22, 2021
Frustrating… voted at 11:06 PM and at 2:45 AM to get this text message. A number of friends had the same thing 😣. #Eurovision # Songfestival2021 pic.twitter.com/pKHIoR0FQo
– Chantal (@ Chan_5_) May 23, 2021
