Saturday, May 19, 2007

Eurovision voting changes

Here's my two ideas to change the voting in Eurovision.

1) Points given to each competing country from each competing country

OK, so pretty self explanatory really, but each country gives points to every other country taking part in order of how well each country scored in the televote. This would mean votes given out in the final of between 1 and 24 points from each country. The points 22, 23 and 24 could still be announced as 8, 10 and 12 are now, whilst the lower points flash up automatically on the screen as points 1 through 7 do now.

The benefit of this system is that it gives a fairer representation of the success of each competing country. It ensures that a country needs to do better across the board than get a few high points from a few countries to still do well.

2) In the semi-final, the qualifiers should be the countries with the votes from the largest amount of other countries, irrespective of their actual score

In this way, a country with votes between 8 and 12 points from eight other countries, wouldn't qualify over a country receiving votes between 1 and 10 points from sixteen other countries. Tie-breaks could be split by using the current points system (or the points system above). In the 2007 semi-final under this system, the qualifiers would have been:-

Serbia - 38
Hungary - 35
Belarus - 29
Latvia - 29
Turkey - 27
Bulgaria - 27
Slovenia - 26
Georgia - 19
Andorra - 19
Poland - 19
Portugal - 15
Norway - 15
Moldova - 14
FYR Macedonia - 13
Albania - 11
Iceland - 10
Cyprus - 10
Denmark - 10
Switzerland - 10
Croatia - 9
Netherlands - 9
Estonia - 6
Montenegro - 6
Israel - 6
Malta - 3
Belgium - 2
Austria - 2
Czech Republic - 1

It doesn't make a difference at the extremes of the table, but does stop some countries having an unfair advantage of qualifying every year.

What do you think?

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