Silvester Belt has just been elected as the Lithuanian representative in Malmö. He’s been celebrating with multiple interviews. We cannot get enough of “Luktelk” — obsessed is an understatement!
The Lithuanian national broadcaster LRT has just released the full breakdown of the voting that took place this Saturday. As we witnessed, Silvester Belt dominated the public vote. In the final’s first round he received 25,502 votes. With this vote alone, he already became the third highest televote-scoring finalist in the Lithuanian national Eurovision pre-selection since 2010. Shower came second with an impressive 15,783 votes, though still almost 10,000 votes behind Silvester. The Roop gathered almost 12,000 public messages and calls.
LRT has also updated the final’s second-round votes. There were multiple complaints from viewers about not receiving messages back for their vote. So much so that even the presenters, during the broadcast, had to address the viewers at home, saying that they were monitoring the activity, and that the systems were simply struggling to send all of the ‘Thank you for your vote’ messages. However, that was followed with the announcements that Silvester Belt had collected 16,688 votes, Shower received 9,066 and The Roop came third with 6,884. That was the score announced on the night. However, it appears more than 37,000 votes were received late because of the total volume that eventually arrived. LRT has announced that Silvester received a total of 34,691 votes, which is 18,003 extra public opinions, more than half of all Silvester’s votes received on Saturday. Shower added another 11,241 votes to their basket and The Roop got another 8,162 calls. This all means, that at the moment of the winner’s announcement, LRT had only counted roughly 47% of the second televote final round.
See the full breakdown of the televote in the second round in the illustration:
Žiūrovų balsai (eterio metu 23:36 – 23:54val.)) – Televote (during broadcast times)
Pavėlavę žiūrovų balsai (po eterio 23:54 – 00:37val.)) – Televote that was received late (during the first 43 minutes after the broadcast)
Iš viso balų – Total votes
We got the breakdown of the full jury vote, and it seems like the band Shower had a tight grip on the first spot. Receiving 12 points from a total of 8 jurors out of 11 who voted, they would have comfortably collected the jury’s 12 points in the old Pabandom iš Naujo system. This means Silvester Belt who would have received 12 points from televote, wouldn’t end up being a winner according to last year’s rules. We would have had the same situation as in Pabandom iš Naujo 2023, where the jury’s favorite Monika Linkytė went to Eurovision instead of Rūta Mur, the slightly higher televote receiver, who tied with Monika for the first spot, but using the Lithuanian broadcaster’s tie-break rule, we would have seen The Shower go to Sweden instead of heavy public’s favorite Silvester.
What do you think about the results? Are you happy Eurovizija.LT used televote to decide the winner or should have they sent the jury’s favorite The Shower? Let us know in the comments!