It is a contest famous for sequins, key changes, and the slow agony of the scoreboard — but for the European Broadcasting Union, the numbers that matter most right now are not musical ones. At the heart of Eurovision's latest crisis is a single, striking figure: 297 points, the total amassed by Israeli singer Yuval Raphael from the public vote alone in 2025, a score that outperformed every other contestant in the hall and carried him, despite finishing fifteenth with the professional juries, all the way to second place overall. What made several broadcasters uneasy was not the margin, but the method: official Israeli government accounts, including one belonging to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had urged supporters to vote for Raphael the maximum permitted number of times. In a letter to participating broadcasters — first reported by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet — the EBU outlined proposals that would move the voting system entirely online and require each viewer to rank their top three acts, rather than casting repeated votes for a single favourite.

The organisation argued that "politically motivated voting" had become persistent and was regarded by many as "deeply worrying." A dedicated fan could still, in theory, register multiple accounts using different payment methods, but the structural incentive for coordinated bloc voting would be substantially weakened. The proposals arrive after the EBU had already tightened the rules for 2026, cutting the maximum number of votes from twenty to ten — a change that did not, in the end, prevent Israeli broadcaster Kan from releasing videos instructing fans to vote ten times for their contestant, content which Eurovision ordered removed as contrary to the spirit of the competition. Bulgaria's Dara, who won this year's contest by topping both the jury and the public vote, represented precisely the kind of clean, double-endorsed result the EBU is now trying to protect.