Eurovision 2023: Voting Changes Announced

Eurovision 2023 – The European Brodacast Union (EBU)’s reference group finalized a new voting format for the upcoming editions. The general idea is that televote will be given more power.

Every ten years or so, the voting format has changed the contest enough that it feels like we’re in a loop, with similar songs, similar results (it’s telling that both Netherlands 2019 and France 2021 got the almost same result – 2nd and 3rd in the two set of votes, 498pts and 499pts respectively) and delegations “playing the game”, having discovered a very specific way to get the very specific results they want. We’ve seen more national final with juries chosing results (in 2022 in Romania, Spain…) or in general more internal choice (COVID made it so, but it was already on the rise through the 2010’s).

In order to shake things up, just like the contest was in a dead-end in the 2000’s with full televote (same countries qualifying, same joke entries – not doing particularly well either -, same type of winners every year), the reference group had to find something. Their reasoning is good, their solution is questionable.

So we can recap what’s said on the EBU’s poster, but it’s pretty self explanatory. Here’s some random thoughts on all three:

• Viewer votes will decide countries qualifying from Semi-Finals: this is probably an answer to some of the recent polemics (Croatia 2021 was a very sad moment, but it was always a mathematical possibility and was bound to happen sooner or later): like having very similar male-vocal show-off ballads in the final. While all of them had competent elements and it therefore would make sense that juries would support them, the final ended up feeling less exciting by the lack of variety, which is at the core of good entertainment TV (which is what the contest is first of all). We know juries and televote have different bias, and we therefore can all agree that 50%-50% remains the better system. Hence…
• Jury votes will be combined with votes from the global audience to decide final result: there’s no better way for now; we know that each bias needs to be limited with the other set of votes; however, the current mood in Europe (rise of populist movements) is against “people we dont know who decide for us” and some jury results are extremely questionable, whether it’s corruption, same bias than televote in friendly or neighborly votes, or simple mystery on what a jury finds in a song or ignores in another. But then you also think, if it’s the fairer system (not the best, but a better than the other ones), why not apply it in semi-finals? Well there are a few reasons: not enough countries vote in a semi-final (less than 20 nowadays) so the bias are less likely to show up in televote (especially with the pot system), the songs that qualify in both lists are often the same anyway (usually 9 out of 10 are in common) and more importantly, on a mathematical level, the juries tend to spread their points differently than televote: take France 2022, it was 25th with juries and got 9pts there but got all the way up to 19th in televote which gave it… 8pts! Less points for 6 places higher! In other words, for doing better in televote than Czech Republic, Belgium, Switzerland, Azerbaijan or Australia, it only got 2 or 3 more points from them, when they all did better in juries and got 70pts for it, pushing France all the way down (not to mention the very unfair 0pt to Germany). So that on a pure mathematical level, the juries end up deciding on the full results way more than televote, which only gets to save one or two songs per year and who can’t downvote whichever entry juries had pushed in the Top anyway. In the end, having televote choses the 10 qualifying entries ensure more songs televote can support in the final to spread the love more and prevent juries to spread their love as well, rounding up both lists to really be different.
• Viewers in non-participating countries will be able to vote online: now that’s probably the trickiest one. The EBU probably asked the reference group to “expand”. The first two solutions were enough to stop the juries bias, so having something ELSE than 50%-50% has got to come from a different reason. Going global, which Eurovision fans have hated since the beginning in 2015, is something the EBU has pushed for every single year since: they hinted at including more countries, they created local versions (failures?) in other continents and keep looking ways to include them that wont out right kill the contest. Having a one set of vote for the full rest of the world is not going to change much (but there is a mathematical chance, even though very thin, that the winner can be decided by that vote alone) but it’s a first step towards going global. Not sure Eurovision fans can really rejoice with the idea, as the contest is already having a hard time with its recent rapid growth: one day, like the World Cup or the Olympics, it will be more or less down to politics and money. Sports? Not so much. With this analogy, you can only imagine what will be left of the music in the contest!

You can read more about the changes here (it includes comments by Martin Österdahl). What do you think of the changes?