San Marino RTV intervenes on the decision of the EBU by change the voting rules for theEurovision 2023 and it does so by linking one of the innovations introduced, namely the possibility for countries that are not certified to cast their vote online after using a credit card which would also serve to certify the origin of that vote.

The head of delegation of San Marino Alessandro Capicchioni points out:

It could be an opportunity to implement televoting in San Marino too, using the new online systems instead of telephone numbering.

Why San Marino doesn’t use televoting and how it will vote

San Marino RTV it is the only broadcaster in the competition that does not benefit from televoting, as the national telephone company Prima makes numbers that are too low to be statistically calculated. The majority of San Marino citizens instead use SIM cards from Italian telephone operators and this makes it impossible to distinguish whether the vote started from that specific number is Italian or San Marino, as the starting “cells” are the same as in Italy.

Once the unfortunate experience of “simulated televoting” was concluded, i.e. carried out by an algorithm that averaged over five countries with musical affinities (method also used as a backup for other countries in case of malfunctions), the decision of San Marino will be completely entrusted, both in the semi-final and in the final, to the five jurorswhose vote will always be counted twice (instead of 58 points, it will assign 116).

The “doubled” set of votes

As far as the other countries are concerned, in the semi-final televoting will be counted twice so as to guarantee two sets of points, while in the final there will continue to be one set of points for the jury and one for televoting.

However, the national juries will also vote in the semi-final: their vote will be a backup in case the televoting doesn’t work (and in that case it will obviously be doubled). Similarly, if there should be problems with the jury of a particular country, in that case the televoting of the country itself will be counted twice.

The mechanism of simulated televoting with related countries will remain only as a last resort if both televoting and jurors’ voting in a given country are cancelled.

San Marino’s alternative proposals: the precedents

It’s not the first time that San Marino RTV proposes an alternative solution. In 2017, when simulated televoting was launched by the EBUon the recommendation of the then general manager Romeo, he presented the proposal to replace him to the Eurovisual consortium for San Marino with a sort of polling jury modeled on Sanremo.

EBU rejected the project, motivating the decision with the fact that a different and completely different mechanism would have been applied for a single country.

In the case of the current proposal however, it would possibly only be a matter of allowing San Marino a mechanism that the EBU has already provided for others, i.e. certified online voting with a credit card.

This would also allow the people of San Marino to be able to express themselves, thus also placing the Titan in the same conditions as other countries.