This morning, the director of San Marino RTV, Carlo Romeo reacted to the new changes to the voting system:

Small States are, once again, discriminated. Not only, now the discrimination is even formalized. This is barely tolerable and the San Marino national Radio and Television is unsure whether it can tolerate it next year too.

Without officially announcing San Marino’s withdrawal from the contest next year, this statement suggests that we might not see San Marino in 2017 at the Eurovision Song Contest. He also explained that the EBU did not consult San Marino RTV, before announcing the changes in the rules:

It is unbearable that certain decisions are simply communicated and not shared with the involved broadcasters. This is, from our point of view, unacceptable.

As a reminder, the new rules state that countries which are unable to provide a valid televoting result, “a substitute result is calculated by the audience result of a pre-selected group of countries. These groups and their composition have been pre-approved by the EBU and the Reference Group”.  In their six participations so far, San Marino was never able to provide a valid televoting result, as they never reached the necessary threshold of votes cast. Should it happen again this year (which will most probably going to happen again), and due to this new change in the rules, we will have a case of a set of votes that has nothing to do with the country they are coming from.