It was one of the most talked about cases involving the Rai and the final of the 2024 Sanremo Festival. During the final of the Kermessewhich saw the triumph of Angelina Mango over Giolier and who was the super favourite, many have denounced chaos in the counting of votes by the public which bounced around and were never recorded, raising fears of some real fraud winner of the Festival. In fact, according to the theories that emerged around the web after the end of the competition, it is not clear how Angelina Mango could have won if she had fewer votes than Giolier. Codacons intervened on what happened and, needless to say, asked Rai “the data on televoting relating to the 2024 Sanremo Festival, among those that have not already been published online by the network”. The first network, however, initially refused to give in to the requests of Codacons and the Association of Radio and Television Services Users. Now there would have been a real twist in the story.
Based on its own regulations, Rai did not disclose the results “considering the data not of public interest”, but from many quarters a formal request was necessary to know the whole truth about the chaos that struck the last Amadeus Festival. And so, after that continue requests, in the end, Codacons won the battle. The green light came from the Commission for access to administrative documents of the Presidency of the Council which accepted the appeal presented by the consumer association.
“In the aftermath of the last episode of the Festival characterized by some disservices and technical problems that had affected the televoting system, Codacons together with Assourt had presented a formal request for access to Rai requesting all the data on the votes cast – we read in a note –. THE data required are those of the individual members of the press room and radio juries and those invalidated and the related motivation – the note continues. Furthermore, clarity is requested on the data of the votes cast by the public from home which were not collected by the system due to technical inefficiencies”.
As already pointed out, Rai never wanted to release the data but due to the appeal presented was forced to back down.
But in the note the associations tend to specify, for the avoidance of doubt, that the request was not “aimed at knowing the percentages of votes obtained by the artists competing in Sanremo 2024. What we want to know is how many votes were invalidated or not collected due to the technical problems recorded during the final evening of the Festival”, he concludes.
