As per tradition…

…round about now, most of the team flies home leaving me to do some kind of wrap-up and number-crunching exercise. Ideally, a cock-eyed and stupid proposal to change the voting system will be included.

Bloody hell though. It seems that at Eurovision Towers, they’ve listened to our fanly pleas for moar information! and said “Ahahaha. More information, you say? MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”.

I now have so many pieces of data that I could almost play a pieces of data game with myself. You invent a scoring system, and we can find out what would have happened. So I’m going to invent a scoring system.

26 songs in the final. Is too many. Begone San Marino and Slovenia, you were a lovely benefit to the final, but get lost, in my new world YER BARRED.

12-10-8 voting was invented in a bygone age where it allowed every country to award points to more than half the songs in the contest. I want that principle back. So, ta-dah! As of now, every country in the final is going to award 12-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 to its top 12 least hated entries.

As everyone knows, it’s very wrong that an active diaspora can just buy points for their own country by wotewotewoting from the country they’re in at the time. It’s also extremely important that the winner of a country’s televoting should always receive points from that country. These requirements are, of course, not the slightest bit mutually exclusive. So I’m going to double the weighting of the televote result compared with that of the jury. Feel free to say “OOOOHHH!” at this point.

Done? Good.

It seems a terrible faff having to find as many as 5 music industry professionals from your national country. So I’m going to sweep all that aside. Four of the jurors can bugger off, and I’ll have the jury vote entirely in the hands of the first-named juror. You know it makes sense. Great money-saving idea!

Finally, the votes of the non-qualified countries. Can’t be doing with them. If they knew about music, they would have qualified. [That seems slightly harsh? – Ed] [Shut up Ed. Doing it this way is mostly because I’m lazy and want to crunch 24 sets of numbers instead of 37 – Nick] [Oh, SNEAKY! Just don’t tell anyone! – Ed] [Don’t worry, I won’t – Nick]

Where was I? I think I was about to walkthrough a sample set of final votes. Asatur Asatryan and the people of Armenia, come in please!

Asatur’s rankings stay as they are in my calculation, except that Slovenia and San Marino are removed and everyone below bumps up. So that’s a 1 to Malta, 2 to Montenegro, down to 23 for Azerbaijan. The televote rankings do the same, but everyone doubles up – 2 to Russia, 4 to Austria, and finally 46 to Azerbaijan.

Asatur really didn’t like Austria and Sweden – hated them, actually – and that’s tempered the over-enthusiasm of the Austrian and Swedish diaspora in Yerevan, but it’s not taken them out of the points altogether. On the other hand, the public have pointed and laughed at Asatur’s deep and passionate love for Maltese music and said “Ahahahaha NO.”

When I started this I thought my enthusiasm would last long enough to do all 24 sets of votes and produce a final scoreboard, but sadly I’ve got bored and really can’t be bothered. To be honest, Austria would undoubtedly still win and I’m just rearranging the furniture.

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James Blair
James Blair
9 years ago

Maybe Mrs Voderman, maybe! Maybe the EBU like it this way. Everyone is bunched together and for televisual viewers that adds to tension. Maybe the iconic status of 12 points 10 points is too hard to shift. It hasn’t created a tie or looseness of 1971-1973 voting system or the debacle attributed to 1969 voting so if it hasn’t caused and issue I’d say the bosses will let it be.
Ps is anyone just a tad depressed now. No esc

James Blair
James Blair
9 years ago
Reply to  James Blair

That said, good idea Nick, maybe!

Darren
Darren
9 years ago

I certainly agree with one of the first points you made – 26 songs are too many. I think that DR dragged things out compared to other 26 song finals, but even so… I think 9 qualifiers from each semi would have been sufficient.

nick_at_esc
nick_at_esc
9 years ago

The fun thing here is that I completely lost interest in this article and decided to delete it unpublished. Imagine my surprise, then, when SOMEBODY messages me last night and says “You’re an idiot! You didn’t publish your article. I’ve posted it for you. :-)”

I clearly need to find the Shred Beyond Recovery button in WordPress. 😉

James Blair
James Blair
9 years ago
Reply to  nick_at_esc

On reflection and reading ESCxtra’s article I do agree with you, will the powers that be want to do it. ESCXtra were also making a comparison to the combined jury and tele vote system which has not been used for two contests.
So who do we write to, Ann Robinson, Mr Ola…

Archie Pemberton
Archie Pemberton
9 years ago

I’ve decided you need a PhD in Applied Statistics to figure out your new voting system. Much more important though, given what we know about the UK televote, is how do we curtail the diaspora effect? Those naughty Poles, all clocking up 20 votes each for their blonde, buxom, but not terribly tuneful, countrywomen. Can we somehow ban them from using their phones on Eurovision Final Day? And anyone caught defying the ban gets their tools confiscated……