Months ago, Christer Björkman, speaking for SVT, had already stated that the voting system this year would be undergoing a change but couldn’t reveal anything yet at the time.
Today we learn what these changes consist of!

The biggest change is that the televotes coming in will be divided into age groups. These different age groups basically become jury members, 7 groups in total, with the 8th group being those of the telephone voters (of all ages). It will no longer be possible to vote via SMS.

What does this mean for the way the results are determined?
Different things for different stages:

In the four heats the eight televote juries hand out 43 points each (1-2-4-6-8-10-12).
In Andra Chansen (the second chance round), each of the 8 televote juries, during the duels, give 1 point to the song that got most votes from them in that duel. In each duel, the entry with the most points from all the groups combined goes on to the final but in case of a tie in points, the entry that received the biggest total amount of points (out of those 2) wins its duel.
In the final these televote juries will be bestowing 58 points each upon the entries (1-8, 10 and 12 points, the classical Eurovision scale) with the eight international juries getting to divide the same points, giving both sides equal weight.

Another change is that the heart app won’t flame like before!
From now on it will only be pounding, way more subtly so it gets harder for the viewers to figure out which songs are doing way better than the rest, but in different colours!
At all times, the hearts will pound in three colours to show which age group is showing the biggest engagement (in terms of voting) in that particular song at that time.
And yes, that means every age group has a colour tied to it!
Which are:

• Green (3-9 years old)
• Turquoise (10-15 years old)
• Blue (16-29 years old)
• Lilac (30-44 years old)
• Pink (45-59 years old)
• Red (60-74 years old)
• Orange (75+ years old)
• No colour (Telephone votes)

SVT stresses that for last year, there wouldn’t have been any change in the direct qualifiers from the heats.

In the presentation of the votes, the age groups won’t be split up during the results, but for the sake of transparency all statistics (including everything split up by age group) will be released in the week after the final.

This new system will eventually give us the successor of Benjamin Ingrosso:

What do you make of these changes?
Do you think it will cause drastic changes?