How One Low Vote Can Flip a Eurovision Jury

So with all this noise about Israel and a vote that may or may not happen, I thought it would be about time to disect the OTHER big news – the fact that juries are increasing form five to seven members.

This will seem like inconsequential window dressing to the average fan who doesn’t understand/care about how those jury votes are gained but, thankfully, we here at OnEurope are NOT average, and Mr Phil is going to talk you through why this is a very good thing.

Let’s do a bit of role-play here ( not a euphemism), and imagine a Eurovision Song Contest with six countries and five jurors each. If we take a look at the votes of “Country Six”, we can see their jurors have done this:

The voting looks normal enough, and at first you might think country 1, with its three first-place votes, would easily get the twelve points. It doesn’t work like that. There’s an extra step. The rankings are turned into numbers using an exponential scale, which just means the top spots are worth far more than the ones below them. A first-place vote becomes 12 points, and everything else drops off sharply from there. When that’s applied, the real jury scores – the ones the public never see – look like this:

So those three first-place votes for Country 1 end up cancelled out because Juror C put the song in last place. That single low ranking drags the total down so much that Country 5, with only two first-place votes, ends up taking the twelve points.

“But Mr Phil” I hear you cry, that’s only a simulation – you can’t back it up with real world facts”. Lets take the Icelandic Jury of 2025. They gave two first place votes to both Sweden and Austria, and the other one to The Netherlands… but because two of their jurors ranked Austria only 11th and 19th, and the Swedes got three second places (to go with their two firsts), they ended up with the 12 points and Austria only bagged 8 points.

It litertally only takes one rogue juror to scupper the points of a country.

Now “rogue” is clearly a concept here – I’m not suggesting for a minute that it smells of fish whenever this happens, it’s just that with each juror carrying 20 percent weight, it’s a massive chunk of points lost if someone doesn’t follow the ‘norm’.

With seven jurors, that weight decreases from 20 percent to 14 percent… and this will mean that individuality, whilst still being expressed, does not necessarily mean that a song deemed “the best” with a majority of the jury fails to get the points it deserves.

I’ve always said five members on a jury was not enough, because anyone with a brain can see this pattern happening. It has only taken about a decade, and a concerted campaign by Israel, seemingly, to change previously closed minds at the EBU.

The organisers are also re-introducing the juries for the Semi Finals, something which, again, I am totally on board with. They should never have removed them after a very poorly disguised attempt at cheating in 2021… but the EBU didn’t have the balls to sit down and think about what they needed to do in order to fix things.

In other regards, the organisation behind Eurovision may have its fingers firmly in its ears, but at least in this regard, they have made a good move.