The jury is back for ESC 2009 Final

eurovision.tv reports:

During a meeting in Moscow, the EBU Reference Group of the Eurovision Song Contest decided to introduce a voting model of a mix between televoting and jury votes in the 2009 Final.

No change will be made in the voting during the Semi-Finals of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Details on the balance between jury and televoting outcome are still to be determined in the months to come.

A survey amongst delegation heads from represented countries revealed that a majority is in favor of such mixed model.
A mixed voting system also has great support amongst the fans of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Svante Stockselius, Executive Supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest said:

"Nothing is more democratic than the vote of the public. But a jury takes the opportunity to listen to the songs several times, before they make up their minds. In Belgrade, we saw a difference in judgment of the public and the back-up juries, and we believe a combination will make the show more interesting."

In its next meeting, later this year, the Reference Group will decide upon the exact way the jury has to be composed, and to discuss rules to assure a fair jury vote.

The Semi-Finals will not see any changes in the voting procedure. As at the 2008 contest, televoters will again decide upon the nine songs that qualify in each of the two Semi-Finals, while the highest ranked entry of the back-up juries that didn't qualify yet through televoting will also qualify.


read also: Eurovision 'Big Four' final spots confirmed

Online petition for EBU to reveal the back-up jury votes

eurovisionthoughts.blogspot.com reports

To: Svante Stockselius & the European Broadcasting Union:

We, the fans of the Eurovision Song Contest, are not happy with the, currently, unfair nature of the voting system. We feel that the voting result of, not only the eastern countries, but the western nations as well, are being adversely affected by the number of immigrants in each country.

It has become a tradition that Germany will always award Turkey 12 points, this could be interpreted as suspicious as the largest population of immigrants in Germany are from Turkey.

The same is happening in all of the Eurovision countries. Ireland has for the last two years given 12 points to Lithuania in the final.

This is also highly suspicious because the highest population of immigrants in Ireland are from Poland and the second highest number are from Lithuania, seeing as Poland was not in the final (but was awarded 10 points in the semi-final) 12 points to Lithuania demonstrates that Ireland's vote may well have been again swayed by the largest immigrant groups of Ireland voting for their own country.

These are just two exaples of what seems to be skewed voting caused by immigrants voting for their home nation while resident in another competing country.We want the results of the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest national back up juries to be made public so that a comparison can be made between them and the actual televote results.

This petition is in no way against the Serbian win, and we feel that it may well have occurred even if jury voting was still in place, what we are aiming for is to highlight the inequality that exists between competing nations in the ESC at present.

Our final goal is to see thee reintroduction, either in full or partially, of the national juries. Many, so called, 'Western nations' are at real threat of withdrawing within the next few years if something is not done to assuage their and their national viewing public fears when it comes to immigrants hijacking their countries voting ability. We do not feel in any way that this is a racist accusation or indeed a racist measure that we are proposing, we only want each country's vote to actually put across that country's views on all competing songs.

Eurovision Thoughts

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