Benidorm Fest is all set to take place next week, with its two semi finals being held on the 30th of January and the 1st of February, and its Grand Final being set for the 3rd. Now the Spanish national broadcaster RTVE published all of the rules around the voting system, which is seemingly fair at a 50-50% split. But is it really?

RTVE published that the eight jury members will carry 50% of the weigth of the results, whilst the demoscopic jury and televoting will count 25% each in the Final result. However, the amount of points given out, even though they match these percentages, do not paint the same picture. Also, RTVE announced that case there is a tie for fourth place in any of the two semi finals, the song that scored more points with the jury will be the one that qualifies – the same rule applies for the Final, in case there’s a tie for the winner.

In every of the shows, each of the 8 jury members will give 12 points to their favorite song, followed by 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, and 2 points for their least favorite one. The points from the demoscopic jury and the televoting will be as follows: the winner of each vote gets 40 points, followed by 35, 30, 28, 25, 22, 20 and 16 points for the last placed one.

When you put all those points together, yes – the percentages match, as the juries will give out a total of 432 points, which is the same amount that the demoscopic jury and televoting together will “hand out” as well. However… if a song gets 12 points from all eight jury members, it will get a total of 96 points, but if another song wins both the televoting and the votes of the demoscopic jury (such as the case with Tanxugueiras in 2022) – that one will only get 80 points. The same way, if each of the jury members gives one song the lowest score – that song will score 16 points, but the least voted song from both televoting and the demoscopic jury can get a minimum of 32. We obviously don’t know which way any of the votes will go, but this voting system seems to be made to reward the jury favorites, as well as the people’s least favorites with higher amounts of points.

Across national selections for Eurovision, there are lots of different voting systems – some more, some less fair. This one unfortunately belongs to the latter group, even though it’s seemingly trying to pass as the fair one.

Let us know which are YOUR personal favorites in this year’s Benidorm Fest by voting in our polls below:

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