Photo Credit: EBU
Ever since 2009, the Eurovision final has always been a 50/50 split between the jury and the televote. Some Eurofans are very happy with this rule as it creates a fair result, whereas other fans think that the public should have more of a say with some fans thinking the public alone should decide the winner. The head of the Norwegian delegation Stig Karlsen proposed a change in the system so the televote would have a 60/40 or maybe a 70/30 split so the televote have more power. In this article we talk about the pros and cons of the juries as a whole, what some results would be like with the 60/40 and 75/25 split, and talk about what could be done with juries to make it even more fair. I will be discussing 2023 in some depth first and then I will discuss the 2025 result.
Why Is This Talked About More Now?
The current 50/50 system has been no stranger to criticism but 2023 saw the most upset yet. In Liverpool, Loreen’s winning song ‘Tattoo’ for Sweden won the hearts of the juries in a landslide scoring 340 points, meanwhile, Käärijä’s song ‘Cha Cha Cha’ for Finland won the hearts of the public, winning with the televote also in a landslide scoring 376 points. While Käärijä’s ‘Cha Cha Cha’ had a great result with the juries finishing in 4th place, Loreen’s ‘Tattoo’ finished 2nd with the public scoring 243 points giving her the overall victory. This result has caused some controversy and uproar amongst some fans because although this isn’t the first time we’ve had a disparity between the jury and televote, there hadn’t been this much of a big difference between the top points with the juries before.
Since 2023, every year the overall winner of Eurovision has been the jury’s favourite but not the public.
As I mentioned in the intro, Stig Karlsen expressed his desire to change the jury/televote split to 60/40 or maybe 70/30. In an interview with The EuroTrip Podcast, Stig said;
“I totally like the concept of having a jury and the public because it makes for much more exciting voting. It makes sense in terms of making sure that there is someone who is caring about the musical craft. The problem now is the gap between the public votes and the jury votes is so big and it happens again and again. If the people are going to feel strongly about the competition and believe in the competition, we should look at the 50/50 thing. Maybe it should be 60/40 and make a statement that the public votes are more important than the jury votes. It’s not a drastic change but I think that would be a good thing.”
Stig Karlsen speaking to The EuroTrip Podcast
It’s worth noting Norway in 2023 struggled with the juries but excelled in the televote finishing 3rd place with the public, helping Alessandra’s viral hit ‘Queen Of Kings‘ secure a Top 5 result overall.
Photo Credit: EBU
What Would The 2023 Results Look Like If It Was 60/40 or 75/25?
Some national finals such as UMK and MGP give more power to the televote and the juries have a smaller say, UMK 2023, Finland’s national final for example was decided by 25% jury/75% televote. This helped Käärijä to landslide the votes and was the clear winner.
If Stig Karlsen got his wish in 2023 and the results would be decided by 60% televote, these would be the 2023 final scores.
Eurovision 2023 Final Results If They Were 60% Televote/40% Jury
- Finland 🇫🇮 571
- Sweden 🇸🇪 564
- Israel 🇮🇱 364
- Italy 🇮🇹 350
- Norway 🇳🇴 301
- Ukraine 🇺🇦 270
- Belgium 🇧🇪 168
- Estonia 🇪🇪 143
- Croatia 🇭🇷 143
- Australia 🇦🇺 129
- Cyprus 🇨🇾 124
- Lithuania 🇱🇹 120
- Armenia 🇦🇲 119
- Czechia 🇨🇿 117
- Poland 🇵🇱 107
- Moldova 🇲🇩 107
- France 🇫🇷 103
- Austria 🇦🇹 102
- Switzerland 🇨🇭 86
- Albania 🇦🇱 85
- Spain 🇪🇸 82
- Slovenia 🇸🇮 80
- Portugal 🇵🇹 52
- Serbia 🇷🇸 30
- United Kingdom 🇬🇧 23
- Germany 🇩🇪 20
Note: During my calculations some countries had a 0.5 but for the purpose of this, I’ve rounded that number up.
Formula used was (the score x country recieved ÷ 50 and then × 60) e.g for Finland (150 jury points ÷ by 50) x 40 + (376 televote points ÷ 50) x 60
Already just by giving the public 10% more power and the juries 10% less power, we can see some major impacts on the overall result with Finland just beating Sweden by only 7 points.
Eurovision 2023 Final Results If They Were 75% Televote/25% Jury
- Finland 🇫🇮 639
- Sweden 🇸🇪 537
- Israel 🇮🇱 367
- Norway 🇳🇴 350
- Italy 🇮🇹 349
- Ukraine 🇺🇦 311
- Croatia 🇭🇷 174
- Belgium 🇧🇪 147
- Poland 🇵🇱 128
- Moldova 🇲🇩 124
- Cyprus 🇨🇾 121
- Armenia 🇦🇲 115
- Lithuania 🇱🇹 110
- Estonia 🇪🇪 106
- France 🇫🇷 102
- Czechia 🇨🇿 100
- Albania 🇦🇱 98
- Australia 🇦🇺 97
- Slovenia 🇸🇮 85
- Switzerland 🇨🇭 78
- Austria 🇦🇹 76
- Spain 🇪🇦 56
- Portugal 🇵🇹 45
- Serbia 🇷🇸 31
- Germany 🇩🇪 25
- United Kingdom 🇬🇧 22
Although the overall top 5 remains the same, looking at the results like this we see Croatia, Poland, and Moldova have now made it into the Top 10. Interestingly, Spain has now dropped into the bottom 5 and Australia and Czechia have tumbled down the board. Another notable difference is that the UK is now in last place instead of Germany.
While nothing will change the result of 2023 it’s interesting to see the impact on the overall votes if this system was put in place. As previously stated, many hardcore Eurovision fans or casual fans were upset at the result, with some even questioning what is the point of the juries in the first place.
Eurovision 2025
Fast forward to Eurovision 2025 and we see another controversial result – but whilst we had another jury led winner, it was the televote results that caused some outrage amongst fans with Israel emerging as the televote winner, comfortably enabling them to finish in 2nd place overall. What has made this more controversial was how it had been revealed in an investigation by Eurovision News Spotlight that there were ads that were published on YouTube asking people to vote for their entry, which were seen by millions of people. Looking at the analysis of the Google Ads, it showed that they were placed by the verified account of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency with no mention of KAN.
You can read more about that by following this link below:
https://spotlight.ebu.ch/p/israeli-government-agency-paid-for
At the time of writing, many broadcasters such as VRT in Belgium and RTVSLO in Slovenia expressed their dissatisfaction with the current voting system and requested for further transparency from the EBU.
Despite these calls, YLE, the Finnish broadcaster who have also asked the EBU for further clarification of their televotes this year has also opened the debate for whether the televote should have 75% of the overall result, and juries have 25%.
How Would The Eurovision 2025 Results Look If There Was A 75/25 Split?
- Israel 🇮🇱 476
- Estonia 🇪🇪 436
- Austria 🇦🇹 396
- Sweden 🇸🇪 356
- Albania 🇦🇱 282
- Ukraine 🇺🇦 267
- Greece 🇬🇷 242
- Italy 🇮🇹 225
- Poland 🇵🇱 217
- Finland 🇫🇮 206
- France 🇫🇷 165
- Germany 🇩🇪 150
- Netherlands 🇳🇱 130
- Latvia 🇱🇻 121
- Norway 🇳🇴 112
- Lithuania 🇱🇹 110
- Switzerland 🇨🇭 107
- Armenia 🇦🇲 66
- Luxembourg 🇱🇺 60
- Malta 🇲🇹 54
- Iceland 🇮🇸 50
- United Kingdom 🇬🇧 44
- Portugal 🇵🇹 38
- San Marino 🇸🇲 32
- Spain 🇪🇸 29
- Denmark 🇩🇰 26
Here we see that Israel would’ve won Eurovision instead of Austria which would have made the result even more controversial. Estonia now would’ve finished in 2nd place over Austria. Interestingly, more Eastern European nations like Poland, Ukraine, Albania and Finland would’ve had had a better result thanks to their high televote score.
Switzerland and the UK would have dropped considerably due to their 0 points in the televote with the UK finishing in the bottom 5 and fan favourite Sissal from Denmark would have finished in last place.
Pros of the Televote
The Contest Wouldn’t Be The Same Without It
The televote is an important part of Eurovision as ever since 1997, millions of loyal viewers are allowed to finally have their say and reward their favourite songs. Giving the public a say in the results allows the show to have much greater engagement with its fans and they will want to know how their votes made an impact to the competition. If a song that does amazingly well with the televote goes on to win Eurovision then it means more people will be happy with the overall result and are more likely to watch the following year.
It Allows More Genres Of Music To Excel
Sometimes the public are more likely to reward genres which a jury wouldn’t necessarily appreciate as much, while juries in history tend to prefer pop songs or ballads, the televote will often reward different sounds. Because of this, it means thanks to the public we have a variety of songs on the top of the Eurovision scoreboard. Indeed back in the mid 1990s, more modern songs were being sent but the contest but weren’t getting the results they deserved because the juries would rank them low.
A clear example of this was Iceland in 1997 who sent Paul Oskar with ‘Minn Hinsti Dans’, which was a techno-pop song not really heard in Eurovision before and had a sensual and edgy staging where his four backing dancers were wearing revealing black latex clothing as they danced around him. The performance was revolutionary for Eurovision standards and pushed the boundaries for the contest at that time. In 1997, the televote was trialled in 5 countries while the other 20 stuck with their national juries. Iceland finished in 20th out of 25 in the end scoring 18 points, However, interestingly 16 of those were from 4 of the countries using televoting proving the song did strike a chord with viewers, and suggests that if the other countries also used a televote then this could have done significantly better at Eurovision.
A Variety of Countries Do Well
Ever since the introduction of the televote, we’ve seen more countries become successful at the contest such as those in Eastern Europe like Croatia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Greece and Finland amongst many others achieving televote victories, when before televoting the contest was mostly dominated by Western European nations.
Cons of the Televote
‘Bloc’ voting
Some fans have criticised the televote for having ‘bloc’ voting because of countries voting for their neighbours (which is true in some cases), but it has to be stated that a lot of countries send big artists who are popular in their neighbouring countries which hence becomes a reason why they get high points.
Televote Is Susceptible to Voter Manipulation
There have been calls for the televote system to be restructured to prevent any possible manipulation of votes. Over the years, it’s emerged that it can be very easy for viewers to vote multiple times on multiple devices for the same song, so instead of someone giving the maximum 20 votes to a song, it’s possible for viewers to give 40, 60 and beyond. In an investigation by ESCInsight, two people were able to use different cards and were able to vote 160 times in a matter of minutes. If you wish to learn more about their investigation, follow the link below:
It is clear that this year especially, if someone wanted to spend hundreds of pounds/euros on voting for their favourite song, then they could do so with ease. What is concerning to many is that if you have many people doing this, then this can begin to influence the overall results of the contest. This is more evident for smaller countries who don’t have as many people voting and the difference between a country scoring 12 points and 2 points may only be a few thousand or even few hundred votes. While it’s not necessarily against the rules to do this, it clearly highlights a problem in the system for this to be going on and changes need to be made to prevent this happening in the future.
However, despite everything discussed with the televote, there are some people who recognise the disparity between the televote and juries regarding the overall results and question what is the point to the juries and why are they responsible for 50% of the voting?
Criteria Of the Juries
In the modern-day contest, each member of the jury is given criteria to follow when voting for their favourite songs, according to the Eurovision website, they are:
- Vocal Capacity
- The performance on stage
- The composition and originality of the song
- The overall impression by the act
Pros of the Juries
They’ve Been Synonymous With Eurovision
Juries have almost always been an integral part of Eurovision. Between the years of 1956 and 1996, juries have had a say on 100% of the results in the contest and it was only in the late 1990s that the televote had their say, which helped modernise the contest. It was only more in the 2000s era of the contest where pretty much every country used a televote. Therefore if juries are to have less of the share of the vote or if they’re scrapped altogether, it could make some fans annoyed as it would be a major change.
They Can Help Smaller Nations
Because some smaller nations such as Malta and San Marino have a lack of voting allies, they often struggle with the televote and therefore fail to qualify, Malta having 2 consecutive last places in 2023 and 2024, and San Marino scoring 0 points in 2023 in their semi-final. Sometimes juries are more likely to reward these nations and this is particularly evident with Malta. However, 2025 has proved that the televote will reward songs regardless of the country if they love it enough as Malta and San Marino both managed to qualify for the final for the first time since 2021. But televote only semi-finals have also impacted other smaller nations in the 2000s such as Monaco and Andorra who never managed to make a final.
Sometimes They’re Needed If The Televote Fails
In some exceptional circumstances, some countries’ televote fails and sometimes a back up jury has to be used, as every country has to give points. The reasons for this could be because of technical issues, if there haven’t been many televotes registered or more extreme cases such as in 2000 when there was a major fireworks disaster on the night of the final in The Netherlands. The Dutch broadcaster NOS decided to cut the Eurovision broadcast so it could focus on continuous news coverage, therefore there was no televote and a back up jury was used to determine their points.
They Are Music Professionals
One thing that sets juries apart from the televote is that the juries are usually all music professionals and will often hear things in songs that the general public won’t, and sometimes this is apparent when you see the full result. Take Estonia and Spain from 2023 for instance – Alika and Blanca Paloma both gave faultless vocal performances of their songs ‘Bridges‘ and ‘Eaea‘ and deservedly both of these songs finished in the Top 10 with the international juries. However, the televote didn’t respond well to them, with Spain actually finishing last with the public. Some fans fear that if juries were to have less of a say in the overall votes, then this would mean that songs that the juries think are quality entries with perfect vocals may get ignored. Even this year, Zoë Më’s beautiful ballad ‘Voyage‘ finished in 2nd place with the juries scoring 214 points, but scoring 0 from the public.
Juries Are Prominent In National Finals
Many national finals today use international juries as well as a televote to help decide their entry. This way whichever song does best, if it does well with them both, then it’s a promising indication that the juries at Eurovision and potentially the public around Europe will respond to it. While the likes of UMK and MGP for Finland and Norway reduce the power of the juries and predominantly let the public decide, the majority of national selections give the juries an equal share of the vote.
‘Bloc Voting’
Televote can sometimes fall victim to so-called ‘Bloc’ and ‘diaspora voting’. Before the 50/50 jury televote rule was introduced in 2009, some viewers were frustrated that it was solely Eastern European countries dominating the voting, with 2007 being the most notable that the whole Top 17 were nations outside of Western Europe – and some thought that they were primarily voting for their neighbours. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some countries such as Malta expressed their dissatisfaction with this saying.
“The perception of biased voting has led to a decline in reputation of Eurovision in Western Europe as a fair music competition.”
However, it’s also very true that many Eastern European nations often send artists that are popular in various countries, and therefore their fans will vote for them, and at that time Eastern European nations dominated the contest. While ‘bloc’ and diaspora voting aren’t as big of a deal as what it was back in the late 2000s, it still goes on to some extent now.
Cons Of The Juries
The Amount Of Jurors
One of the main reasons why some fans aren’t fans of the juries being a part of the voting is that each country only has 5 members on their jury, meaning those few people have a major say in the contest. To put it into perspective for this year there were 37 countries taking part meaning that there were around 185 jurors who were responsible for 50% of the overall vote. Comparing that number to the millions of people across the world that vote in the contest, it’s obvious that each jury member has more of a say than that of one viewer which many think is unfair. Not to mention that the public have to pay to vote every year and some may be unhappy that the money they spent on voting had been somewhat ignored because of 185 people.
Western European Bias?
While the early years of Eurovision mainly featured Western European nations, some Eastern European/Middle Eastern nations did take part – Greece, Turkey, Finland, Israel, Cyprus and Yugoslavia were all regular competitors, however many of these nations were ignored by juries year on year. In the first 20 years of Turkey’s participation, only 1 of their results was a Top 10 finish (9th place). Even when an influx of Eastern European nations began to take part, before 2000, the only Eastern nations to take the trophy were Israel and Yugoslavia. While there have been some exceptions to this such as in 1994 when Poland and Hungary excelled on their debuts both finishing in the Top 5 respectively, many countries struggled.
The 1994 Scoreboard – Photo Credit: EBU
However, once televoting was more widely introduced in the late 1990s, many of these nations had a complete turnaround of success. Countries like Greece, Turkey and Romania began to achieve major success year on year, and Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Ukraine, Greece, Finland, Serbia and Russia all achieved their first victories in the 2000s with Azerbaijan joining the crew in 2011. The jury was reintroduced in 2009 and despite Azerbaijan and Ukraine’s victories post 2009, only one Eastern European country won the jury vote – North Macedonia in 2019. (While Australia did win the jury vote in 2016 and is geographically speaking East, it’s not Eastern European but it’s interesting that Oceanian nations have won the jury vote the same amount of times as Eastern European nations!) These reasons and examples have led many fans to speculate whether there is a bias from juries towards Western European nations.
It’s also worth nothing that one of the reasons Turkey withdrew from Eurovision 2013 was that they expressed their disapproval of the rules and claiming that they were unhappy with the jury system being reintroduced and the televoter’s influence had been decreased to 50%.
Upside Down Votes
There have been a couple of incidents where jurors have marked incorrectly, one example was that of the Danish juror Hilda Heick in 2016 where it was revealed after the final that she had voted the wrong way round, so her “last” placed song, she ended up ranking first by accident. Because of this the overall points would have been different, Ukraine and Australia still would have finished 1st and 2nd but the points difference between them would’ve been 9 instead of 23.
In 2019, more controversially, there were multiple jury errors. One of which was the Belarusian jury’s entire scores being revealed incorrectly. The Belarusian jury were disqualified for partially revealing their votes too early and weren’t replaced for the final. Therefore an aggregate score of other countries’s juries with a similar voting records were used for the final, but it was announced upside down which meant that the bottom 10 were the Top 10. These results were corrected days later when Twitter user @euro_bruno had figured out that there was a mistake. The EBU announced that there had been an error but as a result, it was revealed that North Macedonia would’ve won the jury vote instead of Sweden.
There was also some unusual voting by one of the Czech jurors who appeared to vote upside down as she had ranked Slovenia last in the first semi-final but first in the final. While this hasn’t been confirmed by the EBU, IF this was the case, because of the points difference, Poland would have qualified for the final instead of Belarus.
Irregular Voting Patterns
In 2022, the EBU ruled that six countries’s juries in the second semi-final contained irregular voting patterns – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, and San Marino had all tried to vote for each other. The EBU removed their scores and aggregate substitute votes were used instead but when there were 18 countries competing, a substantial amount of the jury points were aggregates and will have affected the overall results.
Diversity of the Juries
While there’s no doubt that many of these jurors are music professionals, it’s not unnoticed that many of the jurors are much more familiar with the pop music genres, rather than other genres such as rap and rock. As well as Western European nations winning the juries, there have also been a lot of English language pop songs winning the jury. The main exception to this was the landslide winner of 2017, ‘Amar Pelos Dois’ by Salvador Sobral who scored the biggest jury score ever with 382 points and that was a gentle Portuguese ballad. This has led some fans to call for more diverse jury members so that more genres and songs in other languages get rewarded.
Going back to the jury criteria that they have to vote on, songs like ‘Eaea’ which was musically unique combining traditional flamenco and modern sounds, as well as Blanca having an impeccable voice and memorable staging. On paper, looking at that criteria, you’d think ‘Eaea’ would tick all the boxes for a high jury placing, but she only finished in 9th with the juries.
However, some casual fans forget that the juries watch a different performance to that of the public on a Saturday. Even if a singer performs perfectly on the final night, If that singer sings off-key on Friday’s night jury show, juries will penalise them.
How The Jury System Could Be Fixed
All opinions in the following sections of the article are my own and not those representative of anyone from Phoenix or any broadcasters:
In my opinion, to improve the jury system, there are a few things that could be done. One of these is to increase the number of jury members so that more people overall have a say, I realise this may be tricky as previously mentioned in the article, Latvia and Ireland only had 4 members on their jury, but if every country had at least 10-20 jury members, that would make a difference. One thing Spain uses in their National Final is a demoscopic jury to help decide their winner. Benidorm Fest’s demoscopic jury contains over 300 people and they’re responsible for 25% of the vote. Although this is very unrealistic and logistically difficult, if every country had 300 people on their jury then it would mean for Eurovision 2023, over 11,000 people would have been responsible for 50% of the vote which would be a lot fairer than 185. Having this many people would also mean a wider array of results and they’ll be more likely to have more of knowledge in European music.
I think it should be clearer to the juries how to vote to prevent any more jurors from voting upside down and it affecting any of the results again like in 2019. It could be a good idea to have some kind of check on the juries as well so that there’s less of a chance of an incident in 2022 where some countries’ jury votes are invalid and prevent any country from voting in almost identical patterns to others.
Finally, I know this might be very difficult to provide exact translations but I think it could be good for the juries to be given lyrics for each song in their respective language so that they’re able to understand the lyrics and message of the song a lot better. This might help as a lot of the jury winners have predominantly been sung in English.
How The Televote System Could be Fixed
While it’s important for the public to have their say in Eurovision, there are a number of possible ways which could make the voting process a lot fairer and more transparent.
Some people have suggested that they could reduce the amount of votes one device or person can make, so everyone gets a maximum of 5 or 10 votes for example, but as we’ve seen with the ESCInsight investigation, there will still be people who can vote on multiple devices for just one song. One possible solution which could work is to implement a rule where one person can only vote for one country say 5 times out of their 20 votes for example. This then makes the votes more evenly distributed and makes it much more difficult for someone to try and manipulate the votes.
Some people have argued that opening the votes from the beginning of the grand final can have a detrimental effect on the televotes because it can mean fans can vote for a country before hearing the song. This then defeats the purpose of voting for their favourite song. However, this method was tried in 2010 and 2011 when Germany and Azerbaijan emerged victorious.
Another way you could reduce any voter manipulation is by implanting a rule where any online or phone votes are verified through an ID. Countries like Armenia, and Poland for example, whenever you buy a new simcard and register it, you need to bring your ID whereas this isn’t a rule in other countries. If there was a rule in place where if you vote for Eurovision, say online for example then you can verify your ID, then this would reduce the risk of voter manipulation as all voters will be actual people. However implementing this could be very complex, but it’s one way to reduce this problem.
Lastly, this is more of a general rule, but to prevent any unwanted influence of the televote, there should be stricter rules on how songs are advertised and none of them must have any funds from the government. I think this in general is a good idea because some countries have hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds/euros at their disposal whereas others don’t have much money for marketing at all, which can put them at an unfair disadvantage. So if there is a maximum budget used for marketing then it levels the playing field.
Why The Televote/Jury Split Should Stay 50/50
While there are good reasons why the televote should have more power in Eurovision, I personally think it’s fairer to keep the system 50/50. This is because, for one, it’s important to have juries recognise songs of musical quality which the public may not respond to, so there’s a wide range of songs at the top of the scoreboard. It may also be difficult to implement a 60/40, 75/25 split on something like Eurovision because the traditional points system would have to be changed, and some may feel that it’s unfair and confusing. Before the 50/50 rule was introduced in 2009, some countries still used a 50/50 jury/televote system to determine their points in the early 2000s.
In those 14 years where this system has been used to determine the overall winner, these are all the Eurovision winners showing you where they finished in the jury and the televote.
| Winning Country | Jury Placement | Televote Placement | |
| 2009 | Norway 🇳🇴 | 1st | 1st |
| 2010 | Germany 🇩🇪 | 1st | 1st |
| 2011 | Azerbaijan 🇦🇿 | 2nd | 1st |
| 2012 | Sweden 🇸🇪 | 1st | 1st |
| 2013 | Denmark 🇩🇰 | 1st | 1st |
| 2014 | Austria 🇦🇹 | 1st | 1st |
| 2015 | Sweden 🇸🇪 | 1st | 3rd |
| 2016 | Ukraine 🇺🇦 | 2nd | 2nd |
| 2017 | Portugal 🇵🇹 | 1st | 1st |
| 2018 | Israel 🇮🇱 | 3rd | 1st |
| 2019 | Netherlands 🇳🇱 | 3rd | 2nd |
| 2021 | Italy 🇮🇹 | 4th | 1st |
| 2022 | Ukraine 🇺🇦 | 4th | 1st |
| 2023 | Sweden 🇸🇪 | 1st | 2nd |
| 2024 | Switzerland 🇨🇭 | 1st | 5th |
| 2025 | Austria 🇦🇹 | 1st | 4th |
As we can see in this table, both the jury and televote always rank the winning song highly. It also shows that the televote winner has been the winner more times than the jury winner – showing it’s more uncommon that the jury winner doesn’t always go on to win. Before 2023, 2015 was the only year where the juries placed a song considerably higher than the televote score, therefore it’s not like this is a common occurrence in the grand scheme of things that the juries end up deciding the winner. However, this is beginning to become a regular occurrence, but why?
Well in 2023, it was decided that the Semi Finals would be 100% televote meaning the public would have the sole decision on the 10 qualifiers. While this is a good idea in theory, it has meant that the 20 songs in the final are now fighting for the televote points of each country which mathematically means that all 20 of those songs can have their televote score split and if one country like Sweden in 2023, or Switzerland in 2024 scores a huge amount of points with the jury, it means they only realistically need 150-200 points in the televote to guarantee a victory. Until that system is changed, it is more likely we’ll see a jury winner each year until the semi finals become 50/50 again.
Overall, while no Eurovision method is 100% perfect and fans will always debate which system is the best. I think instead of bringing in dramatic changes like Stig Karlsen or Finnish broadcaster YLE have suggested, there are smaller fixable actions that can be rectified to make the system fairer in years to come, such as adding more jury members, and including more diverse jurors who appreciate more kinds of music. There does also need to be a better way the televote system is structured so that any attempts to rig the televote are shut down and don’t have an impact on the final result, as well on clarity as to how an entry can be promoted to their audience, as a fairer contest is a much more popular contest.
Do you think the Eurovision voting system needs to be changed? Are you happy with the juries being an integral part of Eurovision? Let us know in the comments!
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