After their cryptic tweet yesterday, when the EBU tweeted that Eurovision was about to become more exciting, this morning they announced significant changes to the voting in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
This year, there will be TWO announcements of votes. The first announcement will be the jury votes ONLY, and this will follow the familiar format of each country announcing their votes with a spokesperson with 12 points for their favourite, 10 for their second favourite, 8 for third, and so on. The change here is that the spokesperson will only announce who received the 12 points!
After each country has announced their jury votes, the hosts will then announce the televotes for each country. However, this will be in a different format. Each country will allocate 12 points to their favourite, 10 to their second favourite and so on as per the jury voting, but the significant difference is that these votes will not be announced individually. Instead, the points each country receives from televoting will be combined, and will be announced in reverse order – that is, the country which received the fewest number of points from televoting will be announced first, and so on, until the country who received the most points from televoting will be announced last. This is a similar format to how the points are announced in Melodifestivalen. This means that each country now has double the amount of points to give (116 instead of 58).
In 2014 and 2015, the EBU released the split televote and jury points, and based on these, the winner of both contests would have remained the same. This method of combining votes will also be used for the semi-finals. The actual detailed votes each country received from televoting will be available on the Eurovision.tv website after the show.
The EBU have also announced that in the event a particular county cannot deliver a valid televote or jury result, a substitute result calculated by a pre-selected group of countries will be used instead.
Take a look at this short video about how the new voting system will work, and also to the one below where Christer Bjorkman and Martin Ostedahl talk more things about these changes:
So what do you think about the changes? Are they a step in the right direction?
