How Voting Works This Year
This year Junior Eurovision has a brand new voting system. The main headline is that televoting has been cancelled, instead replaced by having separate adult music industry juries and juries of children. In addition to this we have for the first time three expert jurors sitting in the front row of the theatre. Each of these three jurors (Mads Grimstad from Universal Music, Christer Björkman from Swedish broadcaster SVT and Jedward from… Planet Jedward) will have the same voting power as a single adult or kids jury.
In total there will be 37 voting entities in the competition; 17 adult juries in each country, 17 kids juries in each country, and 3 expert jurors in the arena. Each of these 37 will vote in the traditional Eurovision style, 12 points to the winner, 10 points to second place and so on. The adult and kids juries obviously can not vote for their own country, but the expert jurors are free to choose the act of their choice.
As expert jurors Jedward will be able to vote for all 17 competing countries, including Ireland.
Just like the Eurovision Song Contest the adult and kids jurors individually though don’t just vote 1-12. Instead they have to rank each song from first place to last place. Then the average ranks of the five jurors are put together to work out the final 1-12 from that country. In the case of any ties, the jurors use a show of hands to decide which song places highest. All of these jurors have the same four judging criteria as the Eurovision Song Contest:
- vocal capacity
- the performance on stage
- the composition and originality of the song
- the overall impression of the act
Speaking to junioreurovision.tv, expert juror Mads Grimstad has already highlighted what traits he in particular is looking from the acts. Artists need to show ‘a combination of voice, live performance and healthy technique’ as well as ‘broad vocal talent’ and ‘a star of the future.’ Expect Mads to be representative of many jurors in this competition, with vocal talent being more of a focus for points scoring.
What should be noted is that the voting will be shown on screen in an presentation very similar to Eurovision 2016. Each adult jury result will be read out by the child spokesperson backstage in the theatre. These results are followed by the three expert jurors reading out their points. Finally the hosts of the show will read out the combined results of all the kids juries. Expect a tense ending just like we had in Stockholm this May.
What Team Insight Did
This year we have five members of the ESC Insight team on the ground in Malta, Ben Robertson, Alison Wren, Sharleen Wright, Lisa-Jayne Lewis and Ewan Spence. Each of these five people watched the Jury Final for the show and kept a close eye on the performances as they ranked them.
Those results were given back to Ben who has input them into our own system to work out our points.
This here are the points from Team ESC Insight:
12 points: Georgia
10 points: Malta
8 points: Poland
7 points: Bulgaria
6 points: Macedonia
5 points: Belarus
4 points: Italy
3 points: Russia
2 points: Armenia
1 point: Cyprus
Our full scores can be found on this table:
The full rankings of Ben, Alison, Ewan, Lisa and Sharleen during Junior Eurovision’s Jury Final
Top Of The Table
As you may see from our results, there was a clear consensus about the Georgian performance during the show. During the Jury Final the crowd erupted with numerous bouts of applause for little Mariam Mamadashvili. The performance was vocal stunning and the growth in character through the three minutes felt perfect in contrast to the uptempo and fluffy songs before. Certainly the classical style of music makes it slightly less accessible, but I don’t see any jurors being put off voting for Georgia from anything in the mix.
In similar style Malta’s song ‘Parachute‘ had plenty of vocal flourish and the buzz of a passionate local crowd to accentuate each time Christina Magrin dazzles us with her voice, arguably the best in the line up. That said in contrast to Georgia the spread of points here (from 1st to 8th) suggests there’s more chance of variability coming through the scoring. With backing dancers being dropped from the show this week there is little on stage throughout the three minutes for the up-tempo clap-a-long track.
The Polish and Bulgarian songs tied for third place on our averages, with Poland’s Olivia Wieczorek placing higher with the ESC Insight jury by being preferred 3-2 through a show of hands. It is quite easy to conclude from a Georgia, Malta, Poland top 3 that the jury vote is likely to be swayed by the biggest vocals of the night.
In contrast at the bottom of our table both the Ukrainian and Israeli songs don’t offer much space for the artist to show off great vocal capacity. Nothing wrong with either act, but certainly little to vote for in comparison to those placed higher.
Where We Differ
With the jury system of ranking songs from first to last place there is a always chance of us as jurors disagreeing with each other. To mathematically check on which songs divided opinion the most, we calculated the standard deviation for each song from our five jurors. The larger the standard deviation, the more we as jurors disagreed.
The standard deviation results of the ESC Insight Jury
This is important because songs with a low standard deviation are more likely to score across the board from all jurors in all countries. Certainly the Georgian and Polish acts are classically well-done and I don’t see any jurors giving them a low score. Despite us on the ESC Insight team finding the music to Belarus’ ‘Music Is My Only Way‘ not perhaps the most original all of us seemed impressed by the stage show and wanted to reward it with points. Similarly we’d question how much Albania can find high enough scores to break into the top ten. ‘Besoj‘ comes across well but there are better songs in the genres for letting the vocal soar.
The concern from this data is more from the songs at the bottom of the table however. This means there are wildly different opinions between the jurors, and the power of one or two jurors alone may negatively drag a song out of the points scoring places. It makes perfect sense that Macedonia’s track would fall into this category. ‘Love Will Lead The Way‘ feels incredibly 2016 and if YouTube views are taken into consideration this is clearly in the mix. However as a far more commercially-accessible track it’s not battling the power vocal game like so much else of the competition.
One other reason we could foresee diverse voting for Macedonia’s track stems from the reactions in the Press Centre during Martija’s performance, with journalists in the room both supportive and critical to a character with an edge of sassiness that might defy traditional Junior Eurovision. It doesn’t fit in the rest of the show around and we can see how that may jurors would critically consider this both positively and negatively in their scoring.
In a little note as well for viewers, it looks like the top half of the show is the stronger based on these results. Poli Genova appears as an interval act between song 9 and 10, and only three of the following eight songs scored points in the final breakdown.
We’re now in the Press Centre with just a couple of hours to go until the final results. What do you think of our scores and wh0 do you think is going to win?