New Eurovision Voting Calculations

An interesting change this year in how the results will be calculated. This article explains it well.

In essence, before the various countries' juries would determine from their own and their national votes which ten acts would receive points. First would get 12, 2nd 10 and so on. Those all got added up as the evening progressed and, as you may recall, recent years have seen a clear winner established some twenty or thirty minutes before all the votes had been declared. Not ideal, especially for presenters and jury representatives delivering the last few scores.

Now there will be two sets of points awarded: the juries' as before and then the top ten acts based on national votes will also be noted and similar 12 to 1 scares allocated to them. These national votes will not be announced from act to act but accumulated behind the scenes and totals for each act announced at the end of the juries' figures. These will then be announced for each act, starting with the lowest. It is quite possible that the large numbers involved could have an impact on the acts' final positions so we would not know who had won until very close to the end.

The table below shows what the positions would have been had the system been in place last year. Sweden would still have won but the overall audience voting preference for Italy would have resulted in Italy taking second place. Had we been watching the scoreboard, we would have seen Latvia in second place for quite a while!

Country	Place old system	Place new system	Total old	Total new	Jury	Audience
Sweden	1	1	365	625	353	272
Italy	3	2	292	527	171	356
Russia	2	3	303	520	234	286
Belgium	4	4	217	376	186	190
Australia	5	5	196	348	224	124
Latvia	6	6	186	337	249	88
Norway	8	7	102	200	163	37
Estonia	7	8	106	197	53	144
Israel	9	9	97	179	77	102
Georgia	11	10	51	113	62	51
Serbia	10	11	53	98	12	86
Albania	17	12	34	97	4	93
Armenia	16	13	34	92	15	77
Romania	15	14	35	90	21	69
Azerbaijan	12	15	49	88	40	48
Montenegro	13	16	44	78	44	34
Lithuania	18	17	30	75	31	44
Cyprus	22	18	11	71	63	8
Slovenia	14	19	39	63	36	27
Greece	19	20	23	53	29	24
Poland	23	21	10	49	2	47
Hungary	20	22	19	46	29	17
Austria	26	23	0	40	40	0
Spain	21	24	15	32	6	26
Germany	27	25	0	29	24	5
France	25	26	4	27	24	3
United Kingdom	24	27	5	16	12	4

Unfortunately for us here in the UK, our act would have finished last but noone would have received nul points. We would have started as 23rd equal with the juries' 12 points. Then the presenters would have announced  our extra 4 points (after Austria's 0 and France's 3) giving us 16 and lifting us into 22nd place for a while but once Poland got their 47 added and Albania their remarkable 93 A huge difference between jury and public there!) we would be down at the bottom and that would be that.

Sweden's 353 jury score would have had them at the top for most of the time but with five nations still to declare it would have been Latvia in 2nd place. When Australia's total is announced they leap into 2nd place an Belgium briefly take top spot when their scores are announced! Sweden's get announced next and that'll put them back at the top and it can be seen then that Italy would need 454 to catch them and Russia 391. (Someone with a calculator may have worked out by now that there are only 642 left and the next scores both have to be greater than Sweden's 272 so the highest one could be is 369, so not possible but not obviously so).

Russia get their 286 announced and fly from 5th to 2nd. The final vote is Italy and they get just enough to overtake Russia to take 2nd place after being 8th for most of the evening.

These figures are from the table shown on the site linked above. With 39 countries voting the total votes would be 2262 which is what the audience figures add up to but the jury figures only total 2204. That seems to indicate that one country's jury votes were not counted. No idea why. It is unlikely to affect the comparison, though.