The new ESC voting system is a bit fairer

It probably won’t change who wins, though.

Yesterday, a new voting scheme for the Eurovision Song Contest was announced. While in recent years, the votes of the jury and the televote have been combined into one single vote for each country, consisting of the well-known 1-8, 10 and 12 points, in 2016, each country will have two separate votes of 1-8, 10 and 12 points from the televoting and the jury. This of course doubles the total number of points that each country awards, from 58 to 116. While the changes also include a modification to the way the results are announced, we are going to ignore this for the time being, as it does not affect the end result at all.

Of course, the main question to be asked is: “Will this change who wins the contest?”

 

The EBU has released the split results for the ESC in 2014 and 2015, so let’s have a look at those results again and see how the new rules would have changed the outcome:

Eurovision Song Contest 2015

# (old rule)	Country	Jury	Televoting	Total (new rule)
1	Sweden	353	272	625
2	Russia	234	286	520
3	Italy	171	356	527
4	Belgium	186	190	376
5	Australia	224	124	348
6	Latvia	249	88	337
7	Estonia	53	144	197
8	Norway	163	37	200
9	Israel	77	102	179
10	Serbia	12	86	98
11	Georgia	62	51	113
12	Azerbaijan	40	48	88
13	Montenegro	44	34	78
14	Slovenia	36	27	63
15	Romania	21	69	90
16	Armenia	15	77	92
17	Albania	4	93	97
18	Lithuania	31	44	75
19	Greece	29	24	53
20	Hungary	29	17	46
21	Spain	6	26	32
22	Cyprus	63	8	71
23	Poland	2	47	49
24	United Kingdom	12	4	16
25	France	24	3	27
26	Austria	40	0	40
27	Germany	24	5	29

Considering that Italy won the popular vote, Sweden still wins by a large margin.

The more interesting things happen at the end of the table, though. Remember Austria and Germany, who both received a total of 0 points in the grand final? Well, a lot of bad luck was needed for that result. Every time the jury of one country tried to award points to one of those songs, the televote kicked it out of the country’s top ten with a low rating, and vice versa. With the new scheme, every song receives at least a double-digit number of points. Austria and Germany suddenly overtake the UK and France, Austria even manages to get more points in total than Spain!

What becomes clear: It will be very, very hard to get 0 points. You would have to be placed outside of the top 10 by every jury as well as by every televote of every participating country. If Turkey were to compete with a really, really bad song against 42 Armenias, that might happen. But well.

Now, let’s look at 2014, the other year that we do have detailed statistics for:

Eurovision Song Contest 2014

# (old rule)	Country	Jury	Televoting	Total (new rule)
1	Austria	214	306	520
2	The Netherlands	200	220	420
3	Sweden	199	173	372
4	Armenia	113	187	300
5	Hungary	138	83	221
6	Ukraine	72	112	184
7	Russia	62	132	194
8	Norway	102	39	141
9	Denmark	85	42	127
10	Spain	83	29	112
11	Finland	114	36	150
12	Romania	51	103	154
13	Switzerland	26	114	140
14	Poland	23	162	185
15	Iceland	59	38	97
16	Belarus	50	56	106
17	United Kingdom	49	24	73
18	Germany	56	27	83
19	Montenegro	48	27	75
20	Greece	45	41	86
21	Italy	37	22	59
22	Azerbaijan	101	14	115
23	Malta	119	12	131
24	San Marino	16	15	31
25	Slovenia	21	15	36
26	France	5	1	6

Not surprisingly, Austria still wins by a large margin. Again, it is more interesting to look at what happens below the top 10¹. Just look what happens to Malta and Poland: Malta’s contribution received a lot of points from the juries, not so much from the televotes. Poland on the other hand, probably due to optical reasons, received many points from the televotes, whilst the juries did not like the performance that much. Both entries rank much higher with the new scheme (Poland +7, Malta +10).

So why do we still get the same winners? There has been an element of luck that you needed in order to receive points: Until now, a jury and an audience in the same country had to agree that your entry is worthy to receive points. It would not really help if, say, the jury from Malta put you in first place, if their televote put you last. With the new scheme, you would still get the 12 points.

Winning entries usually have high acceptance among the viewers as well as the juries. So the situation where jury rating and televote from one country differ drastically ist less likely to occur for popular entries. Thus, they increase their score by roughly 1.7, while the relative increase in score for lower-ranking entries is likely to be a lot higher, but still not enough to take the crown from the winning entry.

To summarize: The new voting scheme evens out the field a bit. Getting points is less luck-dependent. Everybody gets more points. Unless two songs’ scores are really close, the winning song in the old scheme will most likely also be the winning song in the new scheme. And getting zero points becomes very, very, very unlikely.