Do you like the new voting system?

[pyryniemi]

Crafting a new jury/televote result in case of one of them failing in any country is.............I can't even describe that

I must be one of the few who liked the 2013-15 system, it just needed a bit of fixing (like the televote winner always being guaranteed an X amount of points or different jury vote system etc.) but instead they (nearly) went back to the 2009-2012 system :?

This new system actually FAVOURS the countries that have loyal neighbours; Russia can always count on a maximum 24 from Belarus, but Italy in 2015 for example, would have given their overall 12 pointer Sweden only 13.

 

[ayzelto]

Completely unsure, but I happy SVT is trying to make improvements to the festival, so I hope it works!

 

[r3gg13]

I'm welcoming this change wholeheartedly. I do think that there's logic in saving the televotes for last and presenting it as a unified unit. For one, it puts focus on people and not on countries. That's just my preference. I do see why some are against it.

Had it been the other way around (all juries clumped together, and televoters separated), I think more people would have been agreeable to the change.

 

[Franco]

If they wanted to make things "more interesting" (meaning: "We don't know who the winner is until the last minute") they should have the spokespersons tell the 1 to 10 points and then announce the 12 points from studio:

Example:
Last year, not considering the "12 points", the scoreboard would have been:
Russia 243
Sweden 221
Italy 184
Belgium 181
Australia 172
Latvia 150
Estonia 106
Norway 102
Israel 97
Georgia 51
Serbia 41
Slovenia 39
Azerbaijan 37
Montenegro 32
Lithuania 30
Romania 23
Greece 23
Armenia 22
Albania 22
Hungary 19
Spain 15
Cyprus 11
Poland 10
United Kingdom 5
France 4
Austria 0
Germany 0

And the the host announces the 12 points. Like:
"12 points from Macedonia to... Albania"
"12 points from Georgia to... Armenia"
...
"12 points from Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain to... Italy"
"12 points from Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom to... Sweden"

 

[Stargazer]

I voted unsure since we can't really know what it will be like until we get to experience it. When they do this in Melodifestivalen it's very exciting, but we shall see if it translates well to the Eurovision format.

Having seen practically each and every ESC edition from the 1950s and onwards, there have been SO many different voting systems, often different ones every single year, that I'm not particularly bothered by yet another change in the presentation of the votes. And honestly, it's not like this new system needs to be implemented for all eternity.

 

[cripesdude]

I can't decide if this is really interesting or not really that big a deal! Here are my thoughts...

1 - The Problem - The voting had gotten dull, for years now we have known the winner quite a bit before the voting ends. I think I agree that there is a value in finding a way to make the voting more exciting... even using a logarithm to hide the results until as late as possible didn't really work!

2 - The "New" System - Well, the voting hasn't really changed much at all. We still have a jury vote and a public vote, they just aren't combined anymore resulting in each country giving out two sets of points. I think this is a fair system, and the jury can still counter-act block voting and the public vote still allow the viewers a say.

3 - The Presentation - I understand people's concern that the new system of presentation means the viewers votes are 'lost in a great mass'. At the same time, by leaving these results to the end, it gives them a sense of importance - the final say is from the viewers! I think we all still want 1-8, 10, 12 voting. I think we all still want to go to each national spokesperson. I think we all want a more exciting end. I think this new system might just do all that. If we leave the juries to last it means the final say is not with viewers - I don't think that would work. If we start with the juries as combined results and then go into the public vote revealed as 1-8, 10 and 12, we'll end up with the same problem of knowing the winner before the voting is over.

4 - Possible Concerns - My concerns are that with each national spokesperson only saying the 12 points, it will all be a bit too quick - it feels too quick already with them just announcing 8, 10 and 12! But I understand time is limited. I also would like to see where the public votes come from - so if, for example, the United Kingdom gets a public vote of 123 points I think we need a graphic that shows where the points have come from (this could be a list, or 'bubbles' or something else). I'm also worried about a 'manufactured' result in the case of a jury or televote failing... if the jury fails use the televote result twice? If a televote fails use the jury vote twice? If both fail - disqualify that country's votes?

5 - I'm not worried about... - ...the awkwardness of a last placed country only getting 2 public votes for example. I don't think they will announce the public vote in increasing order - it will be semi random and designed to hide the result until the end. So, if for example, the United Kingdom comes last in the public vote with only 2 points that will be announced in the middle. The presenter(s) won't say "IN LAST PLACE WE HAVE...". It will end up no different to getting a random 1 here, 3 there and then nothing else in the old system. Potential embarrassment is limited.

[EDIT] I just re-read this on Eurovision.tv: "These televoting results will then be announced by the host, starting with the country receiving the fewest points from the public and ending with the country that received the highest number of points". So perhaps add this to my 'possible concerns' list unless they mix it up a bit like I suggest above! Another way to make it less embarrassing for the lower televote scoring countries (and speed things up) might be to award the bottom 10 automatically all together (so they just appear on screen in one go), and then only focus on announcing individually the remaining higher scores?

6 - The Alternatives - I think there are only 2... Firstly, to have kept the old system but do all points 1-10 from national spokespeople and then do the 12s at the end. This has the problem of a winner being obvious still, though, just a little later than usual. The other option would be to try and inject excitement by 'greying out' countries as it becomes mathematically impossible for them to catch up. Then you end up with a score board that more clearly shows who still has a chance and might be more exciting as it is perceived as a race and you know who might still make it. The problem here, though, is that we may still know the result way before the voting is over.

7 - Annual Comparisons - The voting system has changed over the years with the 'maximum points possible' fluctuating. The best way to compare scores over the years has been to look at vote share anyway, given the points system has changed. So this isn't really an issue (or more a pre-exisiting issue that won't go away and is resolved by looking at vote share over the years rather than total points).

8 - Finally "Nul Points" - Maybe I'm confused but I'm pretty certain you could still get "Nul Points"? If both juries and the public only award 1-8, 10 & 12, it's surely possible an entry may not get a single point from any jury or any public vote? So perhaps "Nul Points" is less likely, but it certainly still seems possible?

My conclusion: We still have the 1-8, 10 and 12 points which is iconic to Eurovision. We still visit national spokespeople. We still have juries and public votes. We really won't know the result until the very end. It's still primarily a contest with the show just made a little more exciting (like in the past with closer results!). I think this could work... Let's give it a go and see.

 

[popavapeur]

i don't think they'll say "so xyz get 0 points" if you don't have points then.. you don't have points like now, we're not saying "out of 25 countries, 15 got 0, these are : ...."

I understand why they put the juries vote before : it'll be a shame if they could change the way we voted by changing our winner (like last year), doing this now (even if it's literally the same) it looks like "the televote is most important, it's your points that makes the winner - the vote is incomplete without yours".

I'll be 100% happy if we could keep 8-10-12 points reading + a rule that ask countries to have at least 10-15 ppl in the jury.

EDIT : and i add that if they're doing the design right, it'll be great : if they quickly show balls of flags with numbers under (so the ball is the country and the numbers are the points that the country give to another one) then they're melting together into a big bag of points, that's fine ! we'll be able to see what the televoters of a country voted. I think that's maybe the MOST important part where SVT and EBU have to work on to make it great.

EDIT again : I guess it's forcing some countries to have a valid jury result, i guess a country will be happier with a less corrupt vote than a fake vote made by the ebu with some others pattern votes, right? and for the televote well... San marino

+ for a runaway winner, it's still exciting, because if it's the last country to receive a vote, the runner up would have receive those points before and would make it first place... the big question will be : are the supposed runaway winner having enough points or not ? I don't know if i'm clear enough but you'll always have the doubt of "how many points/ enough to catch the countries that already have gotten theirs, specially the runners up?"

 

[Mii11]

I have mixed feelings about this. I don't like the fact that it is SVT that is trying to dictate how the contest will look like and thus are slowly changing it into Euromelodifestivalen. However, we have not seen how this works out in reality. Perhaps it will be a nice change, especially considering that the juries will be less important now. I will miss the previous voting system though - it is end of a certain Eurovision era.

 

[cripesdude]

EDIT : and i add that if they're doing the design right, it'll be great : if they quickly show balls of flags with numbers under (so the ball is the country and the numbers are the points that the country give to another one) then they're melting together into a big bag of points, that's fine ! we'll be able to see what the televoters of a country voted. I think that's maybe the MOST important part where SVT and EBU have to work on to make it great.

Yep! I really hope they get that right! I'm happy with each country getting it's total one-by-one but I want to see where the points came from on screen!

Also, San Marino... maybe they'll finally have a televote?

 

[ZoboCamel]

8 - Finally "Nul Points" - Maybe I'm confused but I'm pretty certain you could still get "Nul Points"? If both juries and the public only award 1-8, 10 & 12, it's surely possible an entry may not get a single point from any jury or any public vote? So perhaps "Nul Points" is less likely, but it certainly still seems possible?

Yes, it's still possible, but it's far less likely. For a simplified example, let's say that Armenia has an unpopular song. In any given country, there's a 10% chance for a jury to put Armenia in their top 10, and a 10% chance for the televoters to put them in their top 10. Under the old system, if a country is in the top 10 of both the jury and televote of a country, they've got a 100% chance to get points from that country, becoming a 0% chance if they're in neither top 10. Let's say there's a 20% chance of averaging into the top 10, and therefore getting points, if they're in the top 10 of one category and not another.

Mathematically, this means each country can have four outcomes with their split votes:

1. Top 10 in both categories (10% x 10% = 1% chance)
2. Top 10 in neither category(90% x 90% = 81% chance)
3. Top 10 in jury but not televote (90% x 10% = 9% chance)
4. Top 10 in televote but not jury (90% x 10% = 9% chance)

Adding together outcomes 3 and 4, we end with 18% of likely outcomes, and if they result in a top 10 average (and therefore points) 20% of the time, we end with those situations giving points in 3.6% of the total situations. Added to outcome one, this means that each country has a 4.6% chance of giving points to Armenia - or a 95.4% chance of not giving them points. In a 40-country contest, we can figure out the probability of Armenia ending with 0 points by calculating that 95.4% to the power of 39 (ie. 'what is the probability of Armenia receiving no points 39 times in a row'), which gives us the final result of a 15.94% chance of Armenia ending with no points.

However, what about the new system? This should be somewhat easier to calculate, as the two processes are now separate. Effectively, there are now 78 separate voting groups (39 x 2) that could give votes to Armenia, and each of them has a 10% chance to give them votes, or a 90% chance not to give them votes. In this situation, we can calculate the likelihood of Armenia receiving zero points by finding 90% to the power of 78, which gives us the end result of a 2.70% chance to receive no points.

The new system, then reduces the chance of Armenia scoring zero points from 15.94% to 2.70%; their probability of scoring nothing has reduced to almost a sixth of what it was before. Do note, also, that I've just used basic napkin maths here; the likelihood of a particularly bad song ending in either category's top 10 is likely lower than 10%, which would exacerbate the difference. If we were to look at less and less popular songs, you'd notice the ratio of difference between the two percentages growing: it's exponential rather than linear, so particularly bad songs would be helped even more by the new system. Plus, the ratio of difference is likely understated in my calculations - I didn't consider songs that were popular with the televote but not jury (or vice versa), the inclusion of which would've further shown the difference between the two systems.

TL;DR: The new system doesn't eliminate the possibility of ending on zero points, no. However, it's not true that doubling the point pool just takes the chances down to 1/2 of what they were: when you look at the specifics, it actually calculates to be more like 1/6th for the song in our example, growing to 1/10th or more depending on the song in question. It's not out of the question that we'll be seeing more 0-pointers, but if we were getting one, say, every 3 years at the moment, we can probably expect to only see one every 20-25 years under the new voting system.

 

[Pawhlen]

If they wanted to make things "more interesting" (meaning: "We don't know who the winner is until the last minute") they should have the spokespersons tell the 1 to 10 points and then announce the 12 points from studio:

Example:
Last year, not considering the "12 points", the scoreboard would have been:
Russia 243
Sweden 221
Italy 184
Belgium 181
Australia 172
Latvia 150
Estonia 106
Norway 102
Israel 97
Georgia 51
Serbia 41
Slovenia 39
Azerbaijan 37
Montenegro 32
Lithuania 30
Romania 23
Greece 23
Armenia 22
Albania 22
Hungary 19
Spain 15
Cyprus 11
Poland 10
United Kingdom 5
France 4
Austria 0
Germany 0

And the the host announces the 12 points. Like:
"12 points from Macedonia to... Albania"
"12 points from Georgia to... Armenia"
...
"12 points from Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain to... Italy"
"12 points from Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom to... Sweden"

This kind of voting structure was used in our national final for the juries in 1997 and 1999 and it was not that exciting as I could have been

 

[Stargazer]

I have mixed feelings about this. I don't like the fact that it is SVT that is trying to dictate how the contest will look like and thus are slowly changing it into Euromelodifestivalen. However, we have not seen how this works out in reality. Perhaps it will be a nice change, especially considering that the juries will be less important now. I will miss the previous voting system though - it is end of a certain Eurovision era.

To be fair, that is what every single broadcaster has done, or did back in the day at least: changed the format and the presentation to how they wanted the contest to look like that particular year. I'm pretty sure every broadcaster still has that option and SVT is taking advantage of it.

 

[Brandt]

especially considering that the juries will be less important now.

How come

 

[Mii11]

To be fair, that is what every single broadcaster has done, or did back in the day at least: changed the format and the presentation to how they wanted the contest to look like that particular year. I'm pretty sure every broadcaster still has that option and SVT is taking advantage of it.

Possibly, but recently SVT is the only broadcaster that pursues these changes. No other broadcaster wants to turn Eurovision into a copy of its national final. Also when TRT requested changing of the voting system, EBU did nothing to address that. As a result of that Turkey no longer participates (At least this is the oficial reason for their ongoing absence). I think this shows that certain countries are more equal than the others. No one was asking for these changes, if SVT and EBU were so desperate to improve the contest, they should consult their fanbase first to find the most appropriate option (after all, the contest is for the people not the people for the contest).

How come

Now the votes of the televoters and juries will be calculated separately so juries will not be able to cancel points from the televoting. E.g. If Cyprus will be first in the televoting in Greece, they will get 12 points from the televoting but juries may give it, e.g. 6 points. At least that is how I understand it.

 

[Brandt]

Now the votes of the televoters and juries will be calculated separately so juries will not be able to cancel points from the televoting. E.g. If Cyprus will be first in the televoting in Greece, they will get 12 points from the televoting but juries may give it, e.g. 6 points. At least that is how I understand it.

I still can't see any difference now because the same counts for televote, as they can't cancel points from jury votes.

 

[Mii11]

I still can't see any difference now because the same counts for televote, as they can't cancel points from jury votes.

I think this is the best example: Poland in 2014 would be 8th if the current system was applied. They were 5th in the televoting and 24th in the juries voting. However with the past voting system they ended up on 14th place.

 

[Brandt]

I think this is the best example: Poland in 2014 would be 8th if the current system was applied. They were 5th in the televoting and 24th in the juries voting. However with the past voting system they ended up on 14th place.

But it has nothing to do with juries or televote domination. It is all about hitting in top 10. It is about advanced math skills, Poland made it in televote's top 10, while the other countries gave Poland that chance from jury votes to go up instead of sinking down, with current system.

It is still 50/50 domination, and the countries who made it in one side's Top 10 won't be totally gotten out of the voting by the other side, instead they just get at least a few points. That Poland example of yours can be formed with lots other countries with other way around, to make it clear: Make it good in televote, but when you calculate with jury vote, they might go down and down.

 

[DanielLuis]

But it has nothing to do with juries or televote domination. It is all about hitting in top 10. It is about advanced math skills, Poland made it in televote's top 10, while the other countries gave Poland that chance from jury votes to go up instead of sinking down, with current system.

It is still 50/50 domination, and the countries who made it in one side's Top 10 won't be totally gotten out of the voting by the other side, instead they just get at least a few points. That Poland example of yours can be formed with lots other countries with other way around, to make it clear: Make it good in televote, but when you calculate with jury vote, they might go down and down.

The thing is before the juries and televoting ranked every song from 1st to last, and the rankings were added. That meant that if a song finshed 1st in the televoting of a country but the juries placed it in 26th, that song would very likely not get any points at all from that country. The same could apply if a song finished 1st in the jury ranking and 26th the televoting ranking. However, the juries could take advantage of this system to place a song they thought would do very well in the televoting but that they didn't want to win very low on their ranking, while the televoters couldn't really do this. That way the juries could potentially have more power than the televoting (even though I don't think many did this). Now it's truly a 50%/50% divide.

 

[Stargazer]

Possibly, but recently SVT is the only broadcaster that pursues these changes. No other broadcaster wants to turn Eurovision into a copy of its national final. Also when TRT requested changing of the voting system, EBU did nothing to address that. As a result of that Turkey no longer participates (At least this is the oficial reason for their ongoing absence). I think this shows that certain countries are more equal than the others. No one was asking for these changes, if SVT and EBU were so desperate to improve the contest, they should consult their fanbase first to find the most appropriate option (after all, the contest is for the people not the people for the contest).

But Turkey wasn't hosting when they requested the change, were they? I'm sure if Turkey won and hosted, they could change some things too. EBU doesn't need to consult us about anything, we don't own Eurovision.

 

[Mickey]

But Turkey wasn't hosting when they requested the change, were they? I'm sure if Turkey won and hosted, they could change some things too. EBU doesn't need to consult us about anything, we don't own Eurovision.

Historically countries have been able to change things in the presentation and broadcast of the show. For example, the Dutch were the first to introduce postcards between the songs in 1970 (they had to do something to pad it out after everyone pulled out). The UK were going to have postcards, actually in 1963, but for some reason the videos of children's tv characters Pinky and Perky were never used.

Anyway, the point is, while the host country can innovate in terms of the broadcast, they don't get to meddle with the rules of the competition. SVT are special though.