Eurovision 2019 lowers UK's last-place score for Michael Rice and other scores have changed too

From Digital Spy

As if coming dead last at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 wasn't bad enough, now the UK's score for Michael Rice has been lowered even more.

The UK initially accumulated 16 points with the song 'Bigger Than Us' at the event on Saturday (May 18).

Now the score has been dropped by a further five points, bringing Michael's total to 11 after an error led to a "substitute" set of points being dished out, following the Belarus jury being dismissed.

The jury was removed as they revealed their votes from the semi-final, which is against the contest's rules.

In order to fill the gap, the organisers used other countries with similar voting records to calculate an alternative score for the Belarus panel. The original scores can be seen below.

A statement from the European Broadcast Union read: "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. This had no impact on the calculation of points derived from televoting across the 41 participating countries and the overall winner and Top 4 songs of the Contest remain unchanged.

Related: Eurovision: 8 UK entries that were totally robbed of the trophy

"The EBU and its partners deeply regret that this error was not identified earlier and will review the processes and controls in place to prevent this from happening again."

The adjusted scores also mean that Norway moved to 6th place, while Germany moved to second to last place.

The corrected scores are now as follows:

1. Netherlands (498 points)
2. Italy (472 points)
3. Russia (370 points)
4. Switzerland (364 points)
5. Sweden (334 points)
6. Norway (331 points)
7. North Macedonia (305 points)
8. Azerbaijan (302 points)
9. Australia (284 points)
10. Iceland (232 points)
11. Czech Republic (157 points)
12. Denmark (120 points)
13. Cyprus (109 points)
14. Malta (107 points)
15. Slovenia (105 points)
16. France (105 points)
17. Albania (90 points)
18. Serbia (89 points)
19. San Marino (77 points)
20. Estonia (76 points)
21. Greece (74 points)
22. Spain (54 points)
23. Israel (35 points)
24. Belarus (31 points)
25. Germany (24 points)
26. United Kingdom (11 points)

The Netherlands was crowned as the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2019, with 25-year-old singer Duncan Laurence scoring 492 498 points for the song 'Arcade'.

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