Eurovision 2002 - Televoting Watch
Trust the EBU to make everything even more complicated for a year. 2002 has three different methods for deciding points. Some countries are 100% a jury vote (5 countries), some 100% a televote (11 countries), and in others, it's a 50/50 mix of the two (8 countries).
But first, the one true 2002 innovation that we should genuinely still have. The televoting recap goes backwards! That is it starts with the final act on stage, then finishes with the first act - to remind votes of that song way, way back in the past at the beginning of the evening. A new and welcome intervention to attempt to address running order bias. What effect did it have on the result?
There's one more wrinkle to this year's voting. Which countries are using which method. The counties using the juries are Russia, Türkiye, Macedonia, Romania, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The 50/50 method is highly Mediterranean with Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Spain, and Malta joining Finland, Slovenia and Lithuania. The televote was the rest of the big four plus most of the 'traditional' Western European countries - that will possibly become a sore point later...
Now that we have a fully validated vote, lets see what happened. First the running order bias.
It's gone. Well almost. The first 12 songs received 49.5% of the total vote, with the last 12 songs receiving 50.5%. That's as close to unbiased as you can probably expect to get. The televote is still slightly more biased than the other methods, but frankly it's really not by much. Of all the EBU and production experiments with voting over the years, this one looks to have the biggest impact on bias. This method is retained in 2003 and that will yield more information.
There's some weirdness with the split between the three methods. However both the 50/50 votes and the televote largely voted for the countries that won overall, both picking Latvia as their winner with Malta in second place. The jury vote was very close with Romania(!) winning it, Estonia is second place and Latvia third. As Romania are one of the five juries, that's even more noticeable there...
The weirdness continues with the Greek vote. Greece did not receive a single televote. All of their points came from the juries and 50/50 voters. Cyprus received by far the biggest chunk of their votes (61%) from the 50/50, Mediterranean dominated group. You could argue this is down to the traditional Greece-Cyprus 12 point exchange, and that's some of it, but there's more. Neither Greece nor Cyprus were jury only part of the vote, so why did the jury-only countries vote for Greece when the televote didn't - and for a song you'd probably say was more televote friendly? Even taking Greece's 12 points out of Cyprus's score, by far the most of their points came from the 50/50 group. As One were a well known band, and all of the countries where they were big were in that group, maybe that explains it.
Along with Greece, FYROM also received no televoting points at all - and they were one of the juries. In fact fully 24.4% of the jury's points went to other jury voting countries. There are only five of them. If you exclude Bosnia from this, the four other countries gave each other almost 30% of their points. And they didn't blank a single other country. Hmm. Double Hmmm. Hang on...
Romania gave Macedonia 12 points, Russia 10, Cyprus 8, Türikye 7 and Greece 6.
Russia gave Romania 12 points, Cyprus 8 points, and Greece 6 points.
Macedonia gave Romania 12 points, and Türkiye 8 points.
After the competition ESC Today reported that the EBU had said they thought it was "very likely" vote swapping had taken place between countries including Russia, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Macedonia (no mention of Türkiye). This does not cast jury voting in the best of lights. What would the EBU do next year?
An interesting year demonstrating some interesting and manipulative behaviour. However the biggest success is that reverse recap - bring it back!
