Sanremo 2024, the case of the missing votes: would Geolier have won?

Many are asking themselves the same question: in light of the votes lost during the televoting at the latest edition of the Sanremo Festival, Could Geolier have won, beating Angelina Mango? Was the 2024 Sanremo Festival rigged? The answer, despite the deep discomfort and lack of respect towards the public who paid for their text messages, is still no. Let’s start with the facts of the day: Agcom, regarding the Sanremo Festival, has “considered it appropriate to call on Rai to review the technical specifications of the Televoting platform, with reference to the processing capacity of higher flows of votes via SMS, in order to prevent similar future disruptionscommunicating to the Authority the actions taken”. In the note issued by Agcom, the Authority for Communications Guarantees has examined in today’s meeting the results of the checks carried out by the offices on compliance with the conditions of transparency and effectiveness of the televoting held during the 74th edition of the Sanremo Festivalfollowing the numerous reports received. Specific attention was paid to the progress of the Televoting on the last evening of the Festival.

It reads that: “in the last evening approximately 1.8 million votes were invoiced with relative feedback to the user via SMS, another approximately 0.9 million received a text message informing them of a failed charge, while 0.3 million invalid votes, although processed, were not found”. Then the note continues: “From the checks carried out, it emerged that, compared to a number of votes via SMS accounted for equal to approximately 3 million, the number of SMS actually received by the platform was approximately 9.5 million. The excess unaccounted value was caused by saturation of the processing capacity of the televoting platform”. All this “finding that approximately 4.3 million had exceeded the limit of 5 valid votes, with the consequence that potentially valid and unprocessed votes amounted to approximately 2.2 million”.

Hence the question arises about Geolier’s possible victory. The Festival regulations explain that the winner is the result of the average of the televoting (34%), the press room (33%) and the radio jury (33%). There are three juries. Angelina Mango was elected winner of Sanremo 2024 with 40.3% of the votes, divided as follows: 73.5% press room, 31.2% radio jury, 16.1% televoting. Geolier came in second with 25.2% distributed as follows: 1.5% press room, 14.1% radio jury, 60% televoting. So if the Neapolitan singer was the winner in the televoting, Angelina convinced the other two juries, giving checkmate with two thirds. Even if Geolier, in the televoting, had reached even higher percentages he wouldn’t have won anyway.