Eurovision 2016 - Time For A Change!

So, Eurovision 2016 is over and it's pretty obvious to me that something needs to change in the voting system.

Now that the dust has settled and the alcohol has been placed at a safe distance, all that is left to do is reflect a little on things. Reflect on the fact that Ukraine managed to win with an upbeat little number that opened with the lines "When strangers are coming. They come to your house. They kill you all". Reflect on the fact that the new voting system - while certainly making things more tense - also managed to reveal all the more clearly how overwhelmingly political the voting of the national juries is...

Looking at the top three songs this year (Ukraine, Australia, and Russia) it is possible to see from the voting that there were huge discrepancies between how the five person juries and the public voted. This is obvious when considering the jury allocated points (211, 320, and 130) compared to the public allocated points (322, 191, and 361), however when you examine things closer those discrepancies become even larger.

If we examine the juries, we can see that there three juries that didn't give any points to Australia, 17 juries that didn't give any points to Ukraine, and a whopping 21 of the 41 countries' juries didn't give Russia any points.

Looking at the public vote and it's a different picture altogether. While four public votes failed to give any points to Australia, only one public vote (Iceland) failed to give Ukraine any points and not a single public vote gave less than three points to Russia.

In total, there were seven countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Slovenia, and Ukraine) whose juries gave no marks to Russia, but whose public gave them either first or second place. For Ukraine, this was even more pronounced as eight countries (Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, and Russia) had juries giving no marks and the public giving them either first or second place.

But the sheer volume of countries whose juries didn't give any (or who gave very low) points to Russia means that it is Russia that has the greatest variance overall. Whereas Australia received an average of 3.15 points more from the juries than the public, Russia received an average of 5.63 less from the juries than from the public.

To put it into perspective; while 31 national juries awarded more points to Australia than their public, and 13 national juries awarded more points to Ukraine than their public, only 3 national juries awarded more marks to Russia than their public.

The question has to be asked why the opinion of five, quite possibly (and often seemingly) biased, individuals should be worth the same as millions of public votes. Millions of paid for votes. Don't forget, the public are paying millions to register their votes, but their voice is worth only the same as that of five 'industry professionals' who - as can be seen by Saturday's results - are fairly out of touch with the opinions of their public.

Isn't it time we scrapped the juries and make this a wholly public vote? Let's get rid of the political voting and get back to just voting on the music!!