Eurovision Voting System

When we discussed voting theories in our SDA class, I thought about the voting system in Eurovision. Those who are from Europe or who have lived there in the past know very well that Eurovision is a major commercial, entertainment and political matter throughout Europe. It is an annual Europe-wide song contest that has long been controversial. It is broadcasted simultaneously all around the world to millions of viewers.

Previous voting system was such that only fans in each country determined the outcome by voting for their most favourite songs excluding the songs from their own countries. However, historically neighboring countries voted for each other (Balkan Block for instance). So, countries with most number of neighbors had an advantage. Also, countries who wanted to send a political peace signal to some other countries voted for them (e.g. Turkey to Armenia or Cyprus). Finally, diaspora voters became really strong as the immigrants in another countries voted heavily for their original countries. Due to these reasons as well as increasing number of new Central and Eastern European countries on the map, the chances of winning for Western countries have been significantly reduced. In protest, some of them have withdrawn from the contest. Even, petitions were started to change the voting system:

http://www.petitiononline.com/newesc/petition.html

In 2008, the voting system was changed to a half-jury, half-fan system which aimed to eliminate the criticism around the voting method. It also aimed to increase the musical value of the contest rather than political supports or visual aspects of the competition:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/5332681/Eurovision-2009-new-voting-rules.html

Under new rules, viewers from 42 countries vote for 25 finalists songs by phone or text. Each viewer can vote 20 times but cannot vote for one's own country. Next, judges in each country vote. The two different types of votes in each country are then combined equally, which determines the country votes for the Eurovision song contest: The favourite songs get 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 ,2 and 1 points in decreasing order of preference. The song/country with the highest number of cumulative points win the contest. A snapshot of the points assigned by each country to others is shown below (You can also click this picture to see the URL link of Eurovision contest):


Below video shows the actual live voting process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBqTo2lIIGs

This method is very similar to a modified Borda count; modified in the sense that jury determines one half of the votes and millions of viewers determine the other half. However, due to larger point allocation system around the best two (12 and 10 points), the results will be in more in favour of top-2 preferred songs/countries in general.

It looks like, regional and diaspora biases were mitigated to some extent in 2009 thanks to the new voting system. However, we need more samples to make a more informed evaluation whether the new voting system is fairer in evaluating the musical content. My personal opinion is that judges will be biased to a great extent too. Eurovision contest creators will need to make further changes to make the competition more around the music.