Michael Rice’s dismal Eurovision display has had its score lowered by five points after organisers identified an issue with jury voting.
The revision means the UK finished with 11 points instead of 16, which still leaves Rice’s entry rock bottom, after Saturday’s final in Tel Aviv.
The final tallies were recalculated after Eurovision organisers, the European Broadcasting Union, identified and revealed the flaw in its scoring system.
After the Belarusian jury were dismissed for revealing semi-final votes early, an incorrect substitute calculation was used for their final scores. This had an impact on how the jury votes - which count for 50 per cent of the overall score for a country - were tallied.
The European Broadcasting Union - who organise the contest - issued a statement on Wednesday revealing that the Belarusian jury had been dismissed “following the reveal of their votes from the first Semi-Final contrary to the rules of the Eurovision Song Contest”.
The EBU said: “In order to comply with the Contest’s voting regulations, the EBU worked with its voting partner digame to create a substitute aggregated result (calculated based on the results of other countries with similar voting records), which was approved by voting monitor Ernst & Young, to determine the Belarusian jury votes for the Grand Final.
“The EBU can confirm, following standard review practices, we have discovered that due to a human error an incorrect aggregated result was used. To respect both the artists and EBU Members which took part, we wish to correct the final results in accordance with the rules.”
They stressed that the “human error” did not impact any points from televoting and the corrected points did not change the top four songs, with the Netherlands still happily securing the crown.
Duncan Laurence’s winning track Arcade actually finished with 498 points, an increase of six, while Italy’s Mahmood scored 472 to finish second, up from 465.
Germany finished second from bottom with 24 points – not Belarus with 31 as was revealed on the night.
The statement ends: “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."
Full corrected Eurovision 2019 results:
Netherlands (498 points)
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)
