Notes on the Eurovision Song Contest 2023

The notes are revealed in no particular order.

Loreen

Congrats to Loreen who wins the contest once again for Sweden.

I have no quarrel with Loreen winning the contest in general.

What I take issue with is Loreen winning the contest as the Jury favourite over Käärijä (Finland), the even clearer televote favourite (more points). The televote has not given Loreen a single 12 points. That is remarkable, and a strong indicator that something is off with this result.

The juries have – repeatedlydemonstrated that they are unfit to fulfil their role at this contest and that they must therefore not be in a position to determine the contest’s overall winner against the expressed will of the people. This is a contest for the people, not for music professionals1. Getting rid of the jury vote in the semifinals is one step in the right direction. Removing the jury vote from the grand final is the logical and necessary next step. It would be fine to record jury votes as a backup, for example if a suspiciously large number of SIM cards is sold in a small country again. Or to use them as a tie breaker in the grand final, for the unlikely event that multiple entries receive the same number of points from the televote. You can even print out a “Jury Winner” certificate on Saturday morning and hand it over to the respective act, like they do with the other awards. Just keep it out of the main show.

Back to Sweden and Loreen. The staging of Tattoo was, well, difficult. All you see on the narrowed screen is Loreen in her little hotbox, getting from a horizontal into a vertical position, singing, shouting against the wind machine, wiggling her prolonged swamp thing fingers. There is a single, short, pointless wide shot at the end. That is it. That is the only point in the performance where you can actually see (if you are not currently looking elsewhere) that this actually takes place on the Eurovision stage, not back in Sweden or in your grandmother’s bathroom. The staging does not need and does not use the big stage and the crowd around it that the contest offers to the artist. It is like if someone walked on stage, popped a DVD into a projector, pressed play, and filmed the screen.

This kind of staging is not new. Eric Saade had an even worse variant for his Melodifestivalen entry in 2022, where even the audience in the arena could not see him until the end when the walls come down. However, this took place towards the end of covid restrictions for TV productions in Sweden, so the staging has been developed in a context where it is not even sure that there will be an actual audience. With that background, such an experimental staging decision is more comprehensible. And we also had Armenia’s Rosa Linn in 2022, who spent the first two minutes of her song in her little post-it room2. But then she went into the hole she ripped and used the stage and the audience for the highlight last minute of her performance.
Unlike Loreen.

Switzerland

We briefly stay at the topic of staging. Switzerland’s Remo Forrer sang his song “Watergun” and the staging was choreographed by Sacha Jean-Baptiste3. But one part seemed awfully familiar

It has been twenty years. Surely nobody will remember?

Points

Two acts in the second semi-final received zero points from the televote, and therefore zero points overall: Piqued Jacks for San Marino, and Theodor Andrei for Romania. Undeserved of course, because no participant in the Eurovision Song Contest deserves zero points. But well, it is not the greatest surprise.

I am by the way still looking for that video edit of the Romanian entry where Theodor gets body-checked off the stage by the golden sprinter with the dirty hands. If you see one, tell me pls.

Germany’s Lord of the Lost came last overall with 18 points total, while getting more televote points (15) than two other entries (9 – UK, 5 – Spain). Ah, the joy of combined voting results. And yet another opportunity to blame the juries.

Austria

Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
Edgar Allan, Edgar Allan
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe
Edgar Allan Poe

Norway

Click to show tweet

And Finally

Danke, Stefan. Ich habe es sehr gemocht.

  1. Music professionals with at times questionable expertise or selection criteria, I must add.
  2. The room was actually just a rotatable half of a room.
  3. As was Sweden’s, apparently. Turns out if you’re staging everything™ you’re getting all the hate, too 😗

Allgemeine Betriebsinformation

Für den unwahrscheinlichen Fall, dass es jemand in der Chronologie der Beiträge vermisst:
Für den Eurovision Song Contest 2022 gibt nicht mehr den Vergleich von Jury- und Publikumsvoting. Die Jurys haben sehr eindrucksvoll demonstriert, dass ihr Voting nicht ernstzunehmen ist und dass sie ihrer Aufgabe, eine auf objektiven Kriterien basierende Bewertung der Beiträge abzugeben, nicht nachkommen können. Für einen Verarbeitung dieser Phantasiezahlen fehlt mir einfach die Motivation.

Für 2023 erübrigt sich auch der Vergleich in weiten Teilen, da in den Halbfinals das Juryvoting gar nicht mehr relevant ist.

Blockhead voting at the Eurovision Song Contest

The task of a jury member at the Eurovision Song Contest is pretty straightforward:

  1. Watch the Jury Show of the semifinal that your country is allocated to and submit a ranking of all the entries.
  2. Watch the Jury Show of the grand final and submit a ranking of all the entries.

However, it could also go like this:

  1. Watch the Jury Show of the semifinal that your country is allocated to and submit a ranking of all the entries.
  2. Notice that you had to rank them and not give them points, so you should have actually put a 1 next to your favourite song and not a 17, oopsie daisy.
  3. Watch the Jury Show of the grand final and submit a ranking of all the entries, feeling very smug this time because you actually understand the task description.

This is of course an entirely hypothetical scenario. As is widely known, jury members are highly vetted, specifically trained professionals. See, it’s even written in the jury member selection criteria:

Blockhead voting at the Eurovision Song Contest
Oh. music professionals. Right. Anyway!

Let’s call the mishap outlined above “blockhead voting”. A clever play on words on the term “bloc voting”, which is a fan favourite excuse for blaming the own country’s lack of success on external factors.

How would we go about finding cases of blockhead voting?

The Eurovision Song Contest is notorious for its plentitude of voting rule changes over the years. However, we do have detailed voting records for jury members since 2016 on eurovision.tv. This gives us data from 5 contests overall to work with, at the low cost of a bit of web scraping and a few hours of our life that we will never get back.

Now that we have the raw data, it is time to think about what we actually want to find.

Of course we have to work with a few assumptions:

People are inertial.

Assumption 1

Meaning, if a jury member liked a song in the semifinal, they will probably also like the song in the grand final, and give it a high score / low rank again. Also:

Love and hate are stronger than indifference.

Assumption 2

This is an extension to the first assumption. We expect the song a jury member placed on top of the list for the semifinal to be towards the top again for the grand final. The same is true for the end of the list – a bit weaker probably, since we likely lose the bottom half of the ranking when we go from the semifinal to the final. We also expect the order of the songs in the middle to be a lot more volatile.

And finally, a third assumption:

Most jury members are not blockheads.

Assumption 3

This might come to a surprise to some, but we expect most jury members to be able to follow simple instructions.

Our strong belief in Assumption 3 allows us to postulate that there is only a negligible number of jury members who filled out their scoring sheet in the wrong order. Therefore, the statistical properties of “correct” jury votes are roughly equal to the statistical properties of all jury votes. With this, we can try to confirm Assumption 1 and 2.

Checking our own assumptions

We begin by simplifying the data we work on.

After scraping, we have two rankings for each jury member:

  • the ranking of the songs in their respective semifinal
  • the ranking for the songs in the grand final.

Since ten songs advance from each semifinal to the grand final and you cannot vote for your own country, there are a total of nine songs which a jury member has ranked twice – or ten, if we are looking at a jury member from the so-called big five or the host country, who are pre-qualified for the grand final.
We will only focus on those songs that have been ranked twice. This simplifies things a lot.

Now for our assumptions. The average rank difference over all jury members and entries is 1.53, meaning that an entry on average gains or loses 1.53 ranks when comparing the semifinal to the final. If everyone just ranked the entries randomly, the average rank difference would be around 3.2. That seems to support assumption 1. Yay!

To investigate assumption 2, we are going to check how frequently an entry that gets ranked first or last in the semifinal also gets ranked first or last in the grand final1. It turns out that in 58 % of the cases, the entry ranked first is the same for semifinal and grand final, while this is only the case for 35 % of entries that are ranked second, and for 25 % of entries that are ranked third. A similar pattern can be observed for the end of the rankings: 44 % of entries ranked last for the semifinal are then also ranked last for the grand final, which is also true for 27 % of the second-to-last entries, and 22 % of the third-to-last entries. These findings seem to support assumption 2 well enough that we can continue with the most interesting stuff.

The most interesting stuff

We want to find suspicious rankings. It therefore makes sense to start by defining what we actually deem suspicious and what we deem innocuous. Since we don’t want to look through all 1029 jury members by hand, we also want an automated way to find the most suspicious candidates automatically. For this, we try to find a metric that gives the suspicious configuration the highest score and the innocuous one the lowest score. Since some jury members have ranked nine entries twice and some ten, it will probably make sense to normalise the resulting scores to account for that.

To demonstrate what’s suspicious and what is not, we will use Netherlands D from 2016 as an example. The internal order of the 9 songs that were ranked twice did not change at all between the semifinal and the final. In our world, that is as unsuspicious as it gets. If we then flip the order of the semifinal, we get the most suspicious ranking pattern ever™.

The concrete metric that we use does not matter too much since we will investigate the results manually anyway2.

The first thing we find are three more jury members who did not reorder their entries at all:

But we are of course interested in the other end of the list. Let’s have a look at all ten jury members who have scored at least 7 / 10.

Tel Aviv 2019: Czech Republic C – 7.25 / 10

Looks a bit fishy, right? Especially those two first places once you invert the semifinal? Well: Dear readers, we gottem. A certified Blockhead. Plus, we have an indicator that our filtering method might actually work well enough to generate some results.

Lisbon 2018: Belarus A – 7.27 / 10

Once again, there is a suspicious diaginal line in the actual voting behaviour from the bottom of the semifinal to the top of the final, and vice versa. This time though, no article on eurovoix (that I know of).

Rotterdam 2021: Malta C – 7.33 / 10

There seems to be a recurring pattern here, where the last ranks in the semifinal suddenly become the first ranks in the final. How could that be? I wonder.

Lisbon 2018: FYR Macedonia E – 7.82 / 10

Now this is a tricky one. What is more plausible: A stable center, and the tops and bottoms switch places? Or three relatively stable groups where just the internal order switches? I do not know.

Rotterdam 2021: France B – 7.88 / 10

Now this looks like a clear mis-vote to me. A french jury member that ranks the swiss entry, which has been sung in french, last? Heresy. If we flip the votes from the semifinal, it suddenly looks a lot more in character. A clear blockhead candidate for me.

O wait! It’s Gilbert Marcellus! He is the reason this article exists in the first place.

Tel Aviv 2019: Sweden C – 7.92 / 10

We are creeping ever closer to the 8 point mark, and here we have another very clear case of Blockhead voting. If you do not trust me, trust the internet instead.

Lisbon 2018: Israel D – 8.67 / 10

Pointwise, we take a big leap forward with this one. What looked somewhat reversed before, looks like a complicated shoelace pattern after the ranks from the semifinal got switched. Definitely highly suspicious.

Stockholm 2016: Georgia B – 8.67 / 10

With the same score as the previous jury member, this one seems a lot clearer. Not entirely sure what is up with Latvia there (boop!), but either way we are looking at a clear case of Blockhead voting here.

Kyiv 2017: Portugal E – 8.75 / 10

The true atrocity here is not that we are dealing with a case of suspected Blockhead voting, but that this jury member seems to be immune to the saxyness of the moldovan entry.

But hold up. The whole column for this jury member in the grand final looks suspicious. Ranking Croatia first, whereas most other Portuguese jury members rank it towards the end? The same with Romania and Ukraine? This is either spite voting against the other jury members, or an extremely rare case of reverse Blockhead voting. Amazing.

After that high we get to the grand final (hehe) of our investigation.

What we have seen so far included some highly suspicious cases, but our top scorer operates entirely on another level.

Here we go:

Tel Aviv 2019: Russia C – 9.83 / 10

Barely missing the highest achievable score of 10 / 10, this jury member clearly does not know their tops from their bottoms. This is so blatantly obvious, yet nobody seems to have picked up on it. Probably because ranking countries in reverse order seemed to be an ongoing theme in 2019. Who knows.

Conclusion

I don’t know, seems like we have had some success. Sadly.

Since jury members can obviously not be trusted with putting things into the correct order, and we can only detect it in some cases and only once it is too late, there is only one possible solution: The juries must be abolished. One more reason to add to the list.

  1. Where “ranking last in the semifinal” of course means the last rank that still advanced to the grand final. Remember, we’re only looking at entries that were ranked twice.
  2. For completeness: We use the sum of the squares of the numbers of places each entry changes from semifinal to final. We use the square instead of only the absolute value because that puts emphasis on big changes over little changes – bigger number, much bigger square value.