My Thoughts on the ESC Voting Changes

Alright, so unless you either don't use Twitter or Instagram or you've been away from those social medias for a bit, you can't have missed this. But if you did miss it, the new voting changes boils down to two things:

1. Viewers in non-participating countries will now be able to vote online. It is still paid, just like in participating countries (with SMS and such), however now it is not only the participating countries where the public can vote.

2. The semi-finals will be TELEVOTE ONLY. There will NOT be a jury voting in the semi-finals, although they will remain for the finals.

Let's talk about that first one, because I honestly don't see it as a bad thing. There were concerns that international voting blocs would form (say, I don't know, all of Latin America voting for Spain or something), however it was clarified in the eurovision.tv article that the ROW (Rest Of the World) votes only add up to the equivalent of the televote of ONE participating country, that is to say, 58 points (12, 10, 8 etc) spread over 10 countries. So in real terms it really does not make much of a difference, but at least it gives international fans a chance to get involved somehow.

There is a caveat though, and that is the fact that not all non-participating countries can vote. In the Voting Changes FAQ, it was mentioned that there is a "list of eligible countries" to be released later. I would take this to say that the countries with the highest Eurovision viewership outside of the participating countries will be able to vote. I suppose that would include at the very least the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina, and Brazil. We could also consider Japan, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, and maybe some former participants like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Luxembourg, Hungary, Turkey, and maybe even Morocco. No idea on Russia and Belarus. Nonetheless, given that I have found exactly *one* other Eurofan from my little city, I think it's pretty safe to assume that I won't get to vote. So it makes no difference to me.

I've seen people criticizing this and saying that it takes the Euro out of Eurovision. But like I wrote earlier, it's *58* points. Out of a total 4000 something. Unless the voting is super tight at the top, this won't realistically change anything by itself. And no, there is no ROW jury. So the vote gets lumped together with the televotes of all the other countries during the announcement, and uninformed viewers might not even know that there will be such a thing as the ROW televote. So for what it's worth, I don't really think this is terrible. It gets more people outside of Europe and Australia involved, and it doesn't fundamentally change the results.

What it does do however is change the televote-jury balance ever so slightly. With there being no ROW jury, the televote will have the slightest of edges, taking up 50.6% of the total vote versus a previous 50%. Again, unless the top results are really tight, this pretty much changes nothing. So I'm good with this.

What I'm not as good with is the second change, which is the wholesale *removal* of the juries from the semi-finals. You can obviously see where this came from: the 0-point-televote qualification of Azerbaijan in 2022, and perhaps to a lesser extent the 11-point-televote qualification of Switzerland. This of course isn't the first time we've had full televote - in the 2000s there was also prioritization of televote over jury. This saw many countries send songs that were not necessarily musically sophisticated, but served to grab people's attention, such as Dustin the Turkey from Ireland in 2008.

Of course had this system been applied in the previous years then the qualifiers could have looked pretty different; Albania and Cyprus qualifying over Switzerland and Azerbaijan in 2022, Croatia and Denmark over Albania and Belgium in 2021, Poland and Lithuania over Belarus and Denmark in 2019, and so on. And if we go all the way back to 2010, then Sweden would not have even had a single non-qualification to this day, as Anna Bergendahl was a televote qualifier.

One problem that many have pointed out is that this disadvantages smaller countries and/or countries without a large voting bloc. Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, San Marino, Malta, Monaco who's returning in 2024, Slovenia to some extent, and several others.

But here's the thing: I'm not sure it's really a problem. If people think it's a good song and performance, it's gonna get votes, regardless of the country size. All three San Marino qualifications were televote qualifiers. Je Me Casse and Chameleon were both televote qualifiers. And other than Gabriela Gunčíková, all Czech qualifications have been comfortable televote qualifiers. Also looking back, particularly at 2022, were Sekret and Ela REALLY worthy of the final? I don't know about you, but I say no.

Also I'm not particularly a big fan of Mall or The Wrong Place anyway so I wouldn't really be perturbed were they to miss out on the final.

A valid criticism however, is that this move does not solve the root problem: jury rigging, and really rigging more generally. Azerbaijan absolutely does have to work a bit harder for qualification now, but once they get there, they can get back on their old act of buying up jurors, as they clearly did in 2022 with, well, Spain. And while mass SIM card buying doesn't really work for the ROW vote as that relies on credit cards, it's still very much viable (for Azerbaijan) to just buy a bunch of foreign SIM cards of other participating countries and vote en masse for Azerbaijan. Really, this is very much about Azerbaijan in particular. Most of the other still-participating broadcasters are fine, since Bulgaria and Russia aren't doing 2023, and it's less likely for us to see a repeat of Moldova 2021.

2022 has shown that there's clearly an issue with the jury system. But rather than increasing the number of jurors or requiring each participating country to have an independent backup jury, the EBU decides to just do away with the jury vote in the semi-finals. And ultimately I think THAT'S my issue with this. It's not the fact that it disadvantages some countries because frankly statistically it really doesn't; it's that the EBU are not willing to look into jury reform, as opposed to its full removal in the semis.

Ultimately, we don't know how this will pan out yet. Give it a few years, and we'll see whether this will actually work out. But I do think the outrage currently displayed on Twitter isn't quite justified.

And regarding there being fewer available jury show tickets for sale: no one said anything about that. They'll have to do dry runs anyway. Might as well keep the tickets but rebrand them to "First Rehearsal" or something. After all, we know that if there's one thing the EBU wants right now, it's money.

That's what I think of this for now, but I may come back to add onto this later.