Alexander Plyushchev: "Politics and Eurovision"

“Let’s look at the voting. Firstly, the most actively circulated lie is that voting by a “professional jury” (hereinafter, for brevity, just a jury) was introduced only this year. This is a hundred percent and, I am sure, a deliberate lie - there is a jury almost always, but not in all countries.

The exception was the period from 2003 to 2008, but the jury was returned because it turned out that viewers were even more susceptible to the principles of “neighborhood voting.” This viewer voting was not always available - it has existed since 1998, that is, only 18 years out of 60.

Why, with the development of technology, has the jury not been completely abandoned? Precisely because the technologies are imperfect and it is not so difficult to deceive them, for example, by buying up SIM cards."