The Communications Regulatory Authority (Agcom) examined the day before yesterday the results of the checks on the televoting of Sanremo 2024 which was carried out by sending paid text messages. As is known, especially on the final evening, when the mass of votes increased, many complained about the impossibility of understanding whether the vote they had expressed had actually been counted, not having received the expected confirmation always via text message.
The point is not the final result of the competition, which saw the victory of Angelina Mango over the king of televoting Geolier, but the correctness of a system in which viewers spend millions of euros in text messages without knowing whether their vote has been taken into account.
“In the last evening,” Agcom wrote in a press release, “about 1.8 million votes were billed with a corresponding feedback to the user via SMS, another about 0.9 million received a text message informing them of the missed charge, while 0.3 million invalid votes, although processed, were not found.”
“The checks carried out revealed that, in the face of 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 value not accounted for was caused by a saturation of the processing capacity of the televoting platform.”
This is a discrepancy that TIM verified after the Authority requested information. From an analysis of the unaccounted text messages, TIM found that approximately 4.3 million were invalid because the numbers from which they were sent had exceeded the limit of five. valid votes. The potentially valid and unprocessed votes are therefore equal to approximately 2.2 million: not a small number.
Agcom therefore calls on RAI “to review the technical specifications of the televoting platform, with reference to the capacity to process higher flows of votes via SMS, in order to prevent similar future disruptions, communicating the actions undertaken to the Authority”.