Russia’s state-owned Channel One TV has cancelled the results of a popular TV singing competition, The Voice Kids after an investigation uncovered evidence that phone votes were rigged.

Channel One confirmed that ”there was outside influence on the voting that affected the result”, after the probe found evidence of rigged voting – thousands of SMS messages.

Earlier Channel One told journalists it had began to investigate the results of the competition due to ”certain anomalies” in the final vote in the programme's sixth season.

The channel hired a cyber security company, Group-IB, to investigate the vote. They conducted an analysis of calls and text messages and examined possible fraud in the vote count.

According to a statement from the Group-IB investigators, bots were used to submit over 8,000 votes via SMS from 300 phone numbers in favour of the 10-year-old candidate Mikella Abramova, who was handed a landslide victory with 56.5% of the phone-in vote last month.

The performance was described as weak, compared to the two other finalists, according to Russian commentators. She is the daughter of the pop star Alsou, a popular former Eurovision Song Contest entrant, and millionaire banker Yan Abramov.