BB can't C

Last week, SuRie won the Uk's Eurovision You Decide song contest, and will be representing the UK at Eurovision in Lisbon in May.

It's a ho-hum song, out of a pretty uninspiring field. Out of the six songs on offer, I think only Asanda had the potential to make any real impression in the sprawling musical theatre of the Eurovision final.

But whatever. The Uk has spoken...will of the people and all that.


Now, the BBC announced that, for the first time, for the UK finals they would be using the new voting formula that was unveiled by the proper Eurovision competition in 2016 - adding up the jury votes, then assigning points to the artists according to public votes. Both votes - jury and public - each have a 50% weight. A full and simple breakdown of how this new system works can be found here.

But don't take our word for it. This is from the BBC's own website on voting format:

Following the introduction of a revised scoring system in the ESC Final in 2016, the importance of an entry being able to impress both the voting public AND expert juries has become more explicit and by using both in our national selection we are recognising that fact.


Our public vote and our jury vote both take place immediately after all 6 songs have been performed in the live TV show and we do not reveal the result of the jury vote prior to the public vote, or vice versa. It is important that neither vote influences the other - just as in the ESC.

Once both votes are complete and verified, they will each reveal a ranking of the 6 songs from 1st to 6th. The rankings will then be used to award points from 6 (1st position) to 1 (6th position) for each vote.

The points each song has been awarded by both votes are then added together. The song with the highest combined total of points will be declared the winner. In the event of a tie break for first position, the song which received more points in the public vote will be declared the winner.

As happened with the ESC Final in 2016, a win of only the jury vote or only the public vote doesn't guarantee an overall win. The song that will win, is the one that performs best across BOTH the public and jury vote, so the artists need to impress both the jury AND the public as their votes have equal weighting – apart from the tie-break situation where the public vote is the decider.


So, because I'm a stats geek, I am really interested in how the votes for the UK heats broke down - who the judges liked best, who the public preferred, and how these two votes tallied to contribute to the final results.

And here's the rub. We simply don't know the final results. We know who won, because SuRie was announced. But that's all we know. We don't know who came second, how many points SuRie won, how many people voted for her...nothing. The BBC hasn't released a full breakdown. They simply announced, on air, who had won.


Now that's just not on.

When the public voted either by text or phone, they were charged 15p by the BBC (on top of whatever cost your network provider charges).

I think it's only fair that we know exactly where the votes that we paid for went. The BBC's own phone-in voting guidelines, states:

One result, the winner, was half reported to the paying audience. And the there is absolutely no evidence that the vote 'fairly and accurately reflects the opinion of the voting audience'. I'm not saying that it doesn't, but it'd be nice to know.


To that end, I've submitted a freedom of information request to the BBC, as a public body, for a full breakdown of the results:

Will keep you posted.

Them's the Rules

OK, so I heard that a new scoring system is being introduced to this year's Eurovision, one which the organisers say will make the competition exciting right up to the final minute.

Which, you know, we can all get behind, providing this new system continues to represent the will of the European people. We don't want to hark back to the dark days of jury-only voting, after all.

It all sounds exciting, but let's be sure. I think I need to break this new voting system down, if only for myself than for anybody else!

Now...

'Jury-televote 50/50' system

OK, as if I need to tell you, the voting system since 2009 until 2015 worked like this (let's take the UK as a working model):

Step 1 - The UK's professional jury scores ALL of the final entries awards, and awards 12, 10 and 8-1 points to the top 10 songs they choose.

Step 2 - The UK public also votes, and like the jury votes, ALL songs are ranked according to popularity. Then 12 points are awarded to the song with the highest public vote, 10 points to second highest, 8 to the third, and so on down to 1.

Step 3 - The two separate votes are then combined, and this final combined result is what is delivered when the Eurovision hosts asks the shiny British presenters for the UK votes. The UK vote is 50/50 - half 'professional jury' vote, half British public vote.

NB Interestingly, since 2013, in the event that there is a tie for a set of points in the UK's ranking, whoever wins the public vote get the points.

Anyway, by this system, the British vote is equally weighted between the 'expert' jury and the British public (actually slightly weighted in favour of the public, as it should be).

And this voting model is recreated in every country in Europe on the night, regardless of whether they have a song in the finals or not.

NB Pop fact: in 2015, Macedonia and Montenegro, for some reason, had 100% public voting. No jury involved. I tip my hat to you, sirs.

Now, I don't think jury/televote 50/50 makes for a particularly fair voting system. Can you imagine any other elections where a member of the public only get half a vote, the other half being awarded for them by unelected faceless bureaucrats? On the other hand, though, nobody ever said that Eurovision was a democracy. And besides, we all know that the public can't really be trusted with voting - just look at the rise of Donald Trump, the continued existence of the British Conservatives, and the goddamn Hungry Hearts!

Now, though, comes the revolution. The weight of Eurovision voting is about to take a huge swing to the public.

Here's the official Eurovision video to explain all




So, it works like this:
(again, using the UK as a working model)

Step 1&2 -  As step 1 and 2 in the 'jury-televote 50/50'.

- BUT, the two separate votes from the UK are not combined. Instead, the public and the jury votes are kept separate, and Eurovision now has TWO rounds of voting on the night; jury vote and public vote.

Voting Round 1

Step 3 - The shiny face of the UK will pop up to present ONLY the UK jury's votes for their top 10 songs, allocating points as usual from 12, 10, 8-1.

Step 4 - The night proceeds, each country in Europe delivering ONLY their jury's votes of their top 10 songs. By the end of Voting Round 1, the table will reflect ONLY the combined results of each country's jury votes.

MEANWHILE

Step 5 - The UK public's points allocation of 12, 10, 8-1points, kept separate from the jury votes, are sent to Eurovision HQ.

Step 6 - The public points allocation from the UK are then combined with every other country's public points allocation. So if, say, Poland's song scores 12 points from the UK public and 8 from the French public, that will give Poland a combined score of 20 points from those two countries.

Every single country's public points allocation (12, 10, 8-1) is combined together; every single song will be awarded the combined points allocation from each voting country. So, theoretically, if a song was so good that it topped every public vote with the magic 12 points in all 40 participating countries, that song could well end up with a combined public score of 480 points (40x12 points) from the European public, now voting as one bloc.

And the Eurovision bods are correct. This is where it gets exciting. Ready?

Remember, at the end of Voting Round 1, the table will reflect ONLY the combined results of each country's jury votes.

Voting Round 2

Step 7 - AFTER the jury votes have finished, the Eurovision presenters will then read out the combined, Europe-wide points allocation for each and every finalist song, starting with the country that was awarded the least and working up.

Which very much means that we really won't know who has won Eurovision until the very last minute of the night, because HUGE points scores are likely to be awarded.

After Voting Round 1 a song could be sitting in 4th, 200 points behind the 1st place. But then, in Voting Round 2, the same song could be given a MASSIVE public vote of 300 points, and leaps to the top to win, right at the very death!

Talk about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat!!!

Wonderful stuff. It's going to make it difficult to predict the winner each year (although for 2016, as we have maintained since before all the countries had even picked their songs, Bobbysox is still backing Russia for the win).

The public gets a greater say in the overall result, the TV execs have us glued to their programme until the bitter end, the popular and populist songs have a better chance of winning, we all can teeter on the edge of that exhausting and nervous Eurovision excitement for that bit longer...



Exactly, Charlie. Exactly.