Voting at the Eurovision Song Contest
Each participating country is awarded two sets of 12, 10, 8–1 points, based on their ten favourite songs.
After the widespread use of telephone voting in 1998, the contest organizers resorted to juries only in the event of a televoting malfunctions.
Irish broadcaster RTÉ did not receive the polling results from Eircom in time, and substituted votes by a panel of judges.
[3] Between 1997 and 2003, the first years of televoting, lines were opened to the public for only five minutes after the performance and recap of the final song.
The United Kingdom is not able to vote via SMS or the smartphone app, due to legislation implemented after the 2007 British premium-rate phone-in scandal.
The European Broadcasting Union, the producers of the contest, later began contacting international juries by telephone.
One- to seven-point votes were added automatically to the scoreboard, while each country's spokesperson was introduced.
Beginning with the 2019 contest, the televoting points are announced by the presenters based on the juries' rankings, in reverse order.
In 1969, this resulted in a four-way tie for first place, between the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Spain, with no tie-breaking procedure.
[17] In 2010, the 2009 final system was used, with a combination of televoting and jury votes from each country used to select the semi-finalists.
[19][20] As the number of participating countries and the voting systems have varied throughout the contest's history, it may be more relevant to compare what percentage of all points awarded in the competition each song received, computed from the published scoreboards.
This table shows the top ten participating songs, both winning and non-winning, by the number of points received.
[22] A tie-break procedure was implemented after the 1969 contest, in which France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom tied for first place.
The French entry, "Le Dernier qui a parlé..." performed by Amina, finished second, with the smallest-ever losing margin.
In the procedure, sometimes known as a countback, if two or more countries tie, the song receiving more points from the televote is the winner.
[26] As each participating country casts a series of preference votes, under the current scoring system it is rare that a song fails to receive any points at all.
[35] In 2012, although it scored in the combined voting, France's "Echo (You and I)" by Anggun would have received no points if televoting alone had been used.
by Iris received two points in the televoting-only hypothetical results from the Albanian jury, since Albania did not use televoting.
[36] In his book, Nul Points, comic writer Tim Moore interviews several of these performers about how their Eurovision score affected their careers.
[47] Although statistical analysis of the results from 2001 to 2005 suggests regional bloc voting,[48] it is debatable how much in each case is due to ethnic diaspora voting, a sense of ethnic kinship, political alliances or a tendency for culturally-close countries to have similar musical tastes.
[48] The most common examples are Cyprus and Greece, Moldova and Romania, Belarus and Russia, and the Nordic countries.
It is still common for countries to award points to their neighbours regularly, even if they are not part of a voting bloc.
For example, Finland and Estonia or Germany and Poland, Greece and Albania or Armenia and Russia.
Votes may also be based on a diaspora: Greece, Turkey, Poland, Lithuania, Russia and the former Yugoslav countries normally get high scores from Germany or the United Kingdom, Armenia gets votes from France and Belgium, Poland from Ireland, Romania from Spain and Italy, and Albania from Switzerland, Italy and San Marino.
This approach allows the sampling comparison over arbitrary periods consistent with the unbiased assumption of voting patterns.
This methodology also allows for a sliding time window to accumulate a degree of collusion over the years, producing a weighted network.
The previous results are supported and the changes over time provide insight into the collusive behaviours given more or less choice.
