Just revealed: the EBU have made a slight change to the voting system this year!

A small change has been made to ”place the judgment of a group of jurors above the opinion of a single individual juror”.
In previous years all the rankings of all the jurors of a certain country were put together and the country that scored highest on average received 12 points, the second favourite 10 points and so on.

What could potentially happen, though, is that if 4 out of 5 jury members had a song first in their ranking but the fifth jury member placed it last, that it could miss out on points altogether. Every placing of a certain jury member had the same weight and counted equally in determining the outcome of the jury ranking, this is called ”linear weight”.

The change this year, however, is that a certain weight will be designated to different parts of a juror’s ranking: the top 10 will weigh heavier and in particular the top 3! Rewarding is regarded higher than punishing here as the EBU themselves summarise it this way:

The lower a juror ranks a song, the smaller the impact of that ranking on the overall result, while the higher a juror ranks a song, the more impact that ranking will have.

Visualised this ”Expontential Weight Model” looks as following (click on the image for a larger view):

Executive Supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest, Jon Ola Sand, ensures: “The change announced today has no impact on the logistics of the jury voting.”

There will be no change in the way the votes are being presented, it will be the same procedure as in 2016 and 2017, with the jury votes presented first (with their 12 points being announced by spokespersons) and the televoting sequence right after, where the points to every entry from all participating countries put together are shown, often leading up to a thrilling end to the night!

The jury members in question are being announced coming Monday, the 30th of April, at 12:00 on eurovision.tv