Eurovision rules change: Juries are ranking all the songs

Countries

by Juha Repo March 10, 2013 9:21 pm 4,985 views

The rules for the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest were published in December on the official eurovision.tv website.

One of the changes from previous years is that the national juries are now advised that they will rank all the songs in each of the three contests.

Each judge will rank all songs in the order of their preference and they will have to rank every song, except the one from their own country of course.

The televotes will also be ranked from first to last, say 1 to 25 in our example.

The ranks from the televotes and the jury votes will be then combined so, that 12 points will be allocated to the song that has the best rank from the combined ranks, 10 points to the second ranking song, 8 points to the third ranking song and so on.

Before only the top ten songs were taken into account, while now all the songs will receive their individual ranking, while only the combined top 10 will be given votes on the live shows.

So an easy example to explain the change. Say country A gets a first ranking in the televote, but last ranking from the jury. Country B is ranked 11 in both.

In the old system the combined points would have been calculated like this:

  • Country A: 12 points + 0 points = 12 points
  • Country B: 0 points + 0 points  = 0 points

In the new system the ranks would be calculated like this:

  • Country A: 1st rank + 25th rank  = 26th rank
  • Country B: 11th + 11th = 22nd rank
So country B would now be ranked higher and might get to the lower parts of the top ten and get points on the night, while country A would be less likely to be in the top ten in this example.
So the bigger the difference is between the jury and televote ranking, this will give usually a lower combined average ranking. If the countries are ranked similarly by both the juries and the televoters, also the average ranking will reflect this.
The 2013 rules also have an added clause stating that if “votes are casted only in the intent to abuse the voting system or to false the final result [sic]” EBU can decide to remove such votes.

There have been several methods of voting during the history of the contest, the 1-12 points scoring has been in place since 1975.

So despite the changes the viewers will not notice any change on the night of the finals. The iconic “douze points” will still be read out during the Saturday final, while the probably as iconic “nul points” will still not be heard on the live show, as it has never been.

Read the rules for the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest here

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