Well the Swedish organisers promised a big (and “exciting”) change to this year’s contest, and as expected by many, it’s come with the way voting and points are done. Some thought it might be just how the voting results are delivered to make it more suspenseful and/or quicker, but it’s actually more radical than that!
In short, rather than jury and televotes being combined, they are going to be done separately. Each country will give two sets of points: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 and the big 12 – one set from the jury, one set from televote and both of those will count. The jury votes will be announced by national spokespeople and then the televote results will be revealed by the hosts at the end – but as a combined result of all countries’ televotes and the score delivered for each song .
It’s meant to overcome the issues of where jurors might rank a song very low but the televote comes high but the combination of scores meant that country might not get any points at all. It might also make the voting more exciting and less predicatable.
You can read more about it on Eurovision’s own site: “Biggest change to Eurovision Song Contest voting since 1975“.
You can also watch a couple of videos explaining the changes:
What do you think of the changes?