As any Eurovision fan knows, there are five people on each jury. A very simple measure of how independent these jurors are is the spread in the jurors’ votes. Let’s look at the spread between the low and high vote among jurors at each country.
The above graph shows the number of jury votes from each country where the spread between the lowest and highest vote for a given country was 0 (they all voted the same), 1, 2, or 3 (for example the votes ranged from 22 to 25). So what do we find? (spreadsheet here)
Azerbaijan and Montenegro are off the chart. When the EBU says this is not clear collusion, this is akin to people claiming that humans do not contribute to global warming.
Armenia, after you remove the votes where they did their best to trash the other top acts, shows a pretty good spread. They have a spread greater than 10 for 8 acts. Trashing the other top acts is reprehensible but for the rest of their votes, they have a pretty good spread.
Belarus shows poorly above, but not Azerbaijan/Montenegro awful. However, all of their remaining votes (except Poland) have a spread of 8 or less. If the graph above was for spreads of 0 … 5 then they would look as bad. So a bit more independent, but not by much.
And that brings us to Germany. The specific votes are not terribly suspicious (Denmark in first, The Netherlands in second) in terms of bought votes or trying to throw the win. But they do clearly show if not active discussion of the votes, a jury composed of very similar views. Germany needs to improve. Ditto for Iceland.
Latvia, The Netherlands, and Ukraine have low spreads for a couple of countries, but the placement of those countries range from near the first to near the last. Even with the best juries you will see cases where they happen to be in close agreement. All three countries should be careful in their jury selection next year, but this could well be nothing.
Now let’s look at the cases where all five jurors were in total agreement (outside of the fraudulent questionable votes by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Montenegro):
- Azerbaijan & Armenia placed each other in last place. Everyone knows why they do this – is that an acceptable reason for the EBU?
- Finland had all five jurors placing Austria in first place. Their votes for all other countries had a really good spread so this can be put down to all five jurors agreeing with the rest of Europe.
- Germany had all five jurors placing Denmark in first place. This is a symptom of the issues listed above.
- Moldova had all five jurors placing Romania in first place (and Romania would likely have returned the favor if Moldova was in the final). Again like Armenia/Azerbaijan, everyone knows why they do this – is this acceptable to the EBU?
- Poland had all five jurors placing The Netherlands in first place. Like Finland with Austria, this is a reasonable result and full agreement will happen at times.
- Slovenia had all five jurors placing Austria first. Along with Finland & Poland this gives us three votes across 37 x 25 total votes that happened to have total agreement. That’s statistically reasonable (and in fact likely).
And finally kudos to the countries with the largest spreads (votes with a spread of 11+): Macedonia (21), United Kingdom (19), Austria (17), Ireland (17), Hungary (15), Malta (15), Slovenia (15), and Sweden (15).
If you think Dhani is bad, Carl Of USA can often be much worse on other posts. Pleased to see my country (UK) is the 2nd fairest. Televote was Poland #1 though, and the jury hated it, but this is only because we have a crazy amount of Polish people living in Britain now, glad the jury put the opinion across of what British people actually listen to, rather than a disporia vote. On the scandi thing, he did mention Iceland, y’alls. Sweden don’t always give their 12 to neighbours do they? Its not always like that with them, but… Read more »
Doesn’t this all show that people don’t listen with their ears, but with their prejudicial mind-sets? I’d love to see/hear an ESC where you don’t know where the song is from, but have to vote on how much you like it regardless! Never going to happen, obviously … good work, David! Thanks for sharing this. Can we do something about Dhani?
@Zac – I would buy the argument if 3/5 had him in their bottom 5-6 and like 2 had him in the middle or something. But it clearly looks that the Belgian jury arranged to mark Armenia down. As for nordic countries, not a single post soviet country received a top 3 vote from Nordic countries, the only country that did well with them was Armenia who scored mostly 3s and 4s, but yet, Ukraine gave Sweden 12, and the other ones ranked them decent too. But of course, no one will ever say anything about that because it’s always… Read more »
why you only talks and writes about Azerbaijan,Armenia,Montenegro……Nordic countries give their points each other..but you don’t talk about it..NO MORE COMMENT FOR YOU NO
I think Diane has a point. Prove this with scientifically approved methods and you have a case. The way I see it, all the talk about cheating is mainly down to people feeling hurt that their country didn’t do well , and the fact that some countries do not fully understand the concept of a vote. The result will hurt some, bt that doesn’t mean anyone cheatet. That’s just the way votes go.
So, if proven make a case. Otherwise enjoy the show.
the nordic countries strangly seem to never get noticed but i think they are one of the worst blocks. i think the balkans used to be terrible when it was just televoting but now they are ok. but countries like denmark still seem to be up swedens arse. all or the nordics seem to be up sweden arse actually sweden is like the russia of the nords.
Great investigative work David. Too bad nothing will come of it. EBU knows this is going on but refuses/can’t do anything about it since the punishment will not just hurt that particular corrupt country but also hurt ESC viewership. If they punish said particular country, then they risk losing all the viewers from that country. Its more important to have a corrupt contest with a lot of viewers then a fair contest with less viewers. “Money, Money, Money, It’s a rich mans world”
Personally, I believe that Belgium’s jurors didn’t like the song and the performance. I didn’t like the song, so people like that do exist! Also, Aram’s diction was pretty terrible in the Grand Final and I can’t imagine that the jury is going to be very lenient of that.
@David – If that was the case, then Austria should have given Aram 0 points, because the alleged comments were made against the representative of their country. Austria gave Armenia 12. The country where Aram got booed, Netherlands, gave him 7. So, that can’t be it.
@Diane – can you run those calculations? If so, please do and email me!
@Leon – Ok, no Azerbaijan connection. But that vote is as you have said really off. What about this – could it be all of those jurors punished Aram for his bigoted comments about Conchita?
Key to this is finding why. Because without the why, it remains an unlikely but possible anomaly.
Dhani, you are not from Denmark. We all know you are here to troll and poison this site. You are from Trollandia. To call Azerbaidjan Gayzerbaijan just proves you are from Armenia, a country I used to like before, but you are one of those untactful, unfriendlu, unpleasant, un-everything that makes more and more esc-fans to dislike the country.
Administrator, please do something to get rid of this piece of shit!
Macedonia? Hahaha…
Well, they did surprise me giving Denmark 12 points last year, so maybe they finally realized that voting is “fun”. 🙂 As for their representatives, not so much.
@David. I don’t think it’s fair to speculate that Azerbaijan could have any involvement in this. I don’t believe that at all. In the past, Armenia has gotten lots of points from Belgium. In fact from 2006 till 2009, they were constantly getting the top 10 or 12 largely due to big diaspora presence in Belgium. The juries knew this fact very well, they knew that Armenia was going to get the 12 from televoters and they didn’t want Armenia to get any points from them. It’s like they’re “punishing” Armenia.
Have you tried any statistical tools to examine this case? Like with Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test, Pearson Correlation, or Econometric Models like the Logit – Probit model and other methods that could explain the bloc voting of the juries? Because it’ll be great if you could convince the EBU that this case is scientifically proven.. Well, just sayin’..
@Leon – the difference is the scale of what was done.
And in the case of Belgium, why would they single out Armenia to downvote? The rest of their votes were reasonable. Unless all 5 jurors are connected to Azerbaijan, I don’t see how you can claim a motive. And without that it remains unexpected, but not statistically anything more than unusual.
@David – Belgian jury knew that Armenia would score very high in the televote, that’s why they intentionally marked the entry down. I agree, Iceland and Germany also showed groupthink but again, in these past few months all we’ve seen is five countries get a beatdown. And I’m not saying that the claims are unreasonable, all I’m saying is that there are a lot of other countries where the jury vote was largely questionable, why are we concentrating only on these 5 countries?
Juries was supposed to came in Eurovision to stop the block voting… lol But please really why it always has to be an easter country????? Nordic and Wester countries having a block voting as well but no one is complaning
>> they should significant group think.
they showed significant group think.
@Dhani you immature, badly behaved, incoherent, twerp – look at the numbers. And it’s not anti-Eastern bias. Eastern countries like Russia & Ukraine showed very fair and independent jury votes.
It’s 5 specific countries where the numbers make it very clear that the jury vote was not professional & independent. Throwing a temper tantrum and making up conspiracies does not change the facts.
@Leon – I’ll agree with you that the Belgian vote for Armenia is way low. The problem is statistically you will see a couple of outliers in a vote like this. Could it be because it’s Armenia? Maybe. But it could also be random chance where out of 37 juries, you had one where all 5 were unimpressed. I’m looking for the cases where what’s occurred is not statistically unlikely, but statistically impossible.
If you want to complain about Western countries, complain about Germany & Iceland – they should significant group think.
My mistake @David, the Belgian jury is more clever I guess than the Eastern European ones. But it was a well calculated call. In combined voting it gave Armenia the 11th place, just enough to miss the top 10 rank. It’s still pathetic that three of the 5 juries ranked one of the big favorites in the bottom three whereas the other two had him in their bottom 5 and bottom 6.
yesh i wonder why are you always complaining about the eastern countries cheating??? the western is just as bad as them !!! ohh yeah i think i know why! because some eastern people don’t like gays!!! uuuuh everybody has to love you gay guys and do everything for you because if they don’t put all attention and energy on you then they are “homophobes” .
i hate fuckin hysteric gays
@Leon the Belgian jury vote for Armenia was: 21 26 25 24 19. That placed them 25th (not last, they placed Poland last) and not unanimous.
If you’re going to complain, get your facts straight.
I think you should also address the fact that Belgian jury unanimously placed Armenia last whereas the public placed them first. Very suspicious. But of course, Belgium is not an Eastern European country so we’ll let that one slip. At this point, it’s like beating a dead horse wiwi seriously?
@Azeri – Do you hate that much that you cannot appreciate a musical artist from Armenia? I feel sorry for you.
what about denmark?? we always vote for our neighbors!!! sweden gets top marks every year its the same !!
actually this year the public gave the netherlands 12 points but stupid motherfucker dumb jury all 5 of them gave sweden 12 , and everybody is talking about then try helps against block voting crap jury i hate you !!!
gayzerbaijan
Do you think we will vote for our enemies çirkin armenians no don’t think so we don’t vote for animals