Any song published now on from September 1st could be our Eurovision winner fair and square. The man to keep us updated on the happenings from national finals, preselections and internet scoops is our newsletter editor Ben Robertson. Make sure you view the latest ESC Insight Newsletter to keep you up to date with all the Eurovision news.
In this edition the newsletter looks at where the deadlines are across Europe for submitting possible entries, the drama of the Belarussian Junior final and as always Robertson’s Reflection. This week the newsletter ends with Ben’s personal take of what did not make the final cut of his suggestions to improve Eurovision through his Voting Insight series:
With that in mind, I believe I watered down some of the conclusions that I made from the analysis. Eurovision is not in crisis, and the anger that sometimes spills out from the die hard fans is easily put to bed. We do not need a revolution in how Eurovision works. However, mathematically some things could be suggested to make it better.
Ideally, my new voting system for the Grand Final would have allowed countries to vote for even more than the top 10 they do previously, and my suggestion would probably be to extend to a top 15. With the gap of positive to negative jury voting naturally moving lower as more countries take part in the Saturday night show, the fair voting system would ideally come down to this level. We could then witness countries giving out 13, 14 and 15 points to their top three songs.
There is another benefit. Countries would not be able to just ‘vote East’ or ‘vote West’, Azerbaijan would be awarding some of their points to countries in Western Europe and the televoters of Ireland would equally cast points the other way. Guaranteed. Political voting groans would depreciate as we would see the barriers across the continent collide from every country voting.
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