Today's news about the change of voting system went through fandom like an earthquake and showed once again the Eurovision song contest has the most passionate fandom ever. In good and bad, especially in bad. The truth is the youngsters don't remember - or know - the voting system has changed about a zillion times over the decades from on spot two member juries to televote to 20 member juries to anything in between. The televoting (since 1998 only) has been from five minutes to 10, then 15, after songs or during songs, depending the year. Even the scores given kept changing most every year from one to ten given out in various combinations until 1975 when the infamous Twelve points system was invented by a Finn and has been in use ever since. Even that has had a minor change as first the votes were given out in running order before they were changed to the more exciting one from one to 12 we know today instead. These days of course we only get to hear the 12 said out loud when first to cut time the points from one to seven were cut, then even eight and ten. A lot of changes!
So, what is changing this time?
Rest of the world vote. People from non participating countries are allowed to vote via credit card secured vote. Before this only Serbia & Montenegro was allowed to vote back in 2006 even if they withdraw from the contest (long story). It is a bit unclear who can vote: Can for example Finns vote even in the semi-final they are taking part via this online voting or vote for themselves? Or will the Finnish credit cards be banned that night? Ebu will release a detailed list of countries on a later date. However, this vote will count only as one country's vote worth (aka 58 points), and there will not be a Rest of the world jury, this making the public vote in the end count 50,6% instead of the previous 50/50 televote/jury vote.
There will be no jury vote in the semi-finals but the juries will be back in the grand final. Sadly this seems to be the only reason to keep up with the juries: "Maintaining the Jury vote for the Grand Final also allows us to continue a long-held tradition of uniting all the 37 participating countries on air with spokespeople delivering votes from their nation." I think this will leave the most "difficult" and artistic, original entries in the semi-final, maybe the ones in native languages as well as people might vote ahead only the poppiest, easiest, cheesiest ones with the gimmicky humor acts and ones with huge stage numbers. We already had full televote (or almost) throughout the 2000's and that decade is Eurovision history's worst by far imho.
The main reason for this change, besides of course cashing on the Rest of the world vote, is the irregularities in the jury votes, says Ebu. In 2022 there was the culmination of it with six countries votes annulled and replaced but as we all know the story is longer than that and certain countries have used a lot of money to rig the voting in various ways, both televotes in the early years and later with the juries mostly. And I might like to add the juries haven't really changed the televote friendly voting pattern when Greece and Cyprus juries keep voting each others, as does Romania and Moldova, and Nordic juries voting Sweden no matter what. However, this won't certainly end here.
Let's see how all this will change the contest in the future. As I said before the full televote in the 2000's didn't certainly rise the quality of the songs - or winners - where as the progress in the past few years has been excellent bringing global success stories and hits to the participants. Small countries, minority languages, quality entries without stage shows will certainly suffer, I think.
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