This year I was really excited to be voting in Eurovision for the first time.
I’ve been eligible as long as Australia’s been in the comp (about 11 years) but this year I was finally motivated to get up at 5AM to watch it live and participate, both out of desire to avoid having to avoid spoilers all of my Sunday, and because Delta Goodrem was thought to have a good chance of winning.
I was organising my votes in the Eurovision app on my phone, but when the post-acts voting window opened, I couldn’t find that part of the app again. Refusing to be thwarted, I ran to the computer and redid all my votes there, then pushed 'em through for the grand sum of AUD$7.00 (the max 10 votes allowed at 70 cents each).
What I thought was neat was how for each act I voted for, I received a pre-recorded 10-15 second thank you video from that act. So these videos appeared in a queue in the window.
That made me wonder whether something similar could ever happen in IFComp. It feels difficult and unlikely - and also, what if I’m voting for the game to give it 3 out of 10? - but still, the idea kinda floats in my head.
The UK charges 15p per vote, which (with the exchange rate) is more than twice as cheap as the Australian cost. Maybe as the Australian live viewer is more dedicated an audience due to the time zone, they know they can charge a higher amount?
Another yank here, but it does sound like they go out of their way to make voting difficult… especially if they use to use the terrible, horrible, no good very bad technology is text messages… Makes me wonder how they handled voting prior to the advent of cell phones since I understand the Contest dates back to like the 50s or 60s(I remember coming across 50th anniversary compilations of the winners and runner ups at some point, which might have been close to 20 years ago since the annual compilations I own are 2007 and 2008 if memory serves).
By phone. My memory of the period, which coincides with when I started watching Eurovision (late 90s) is that during the recaps, telephone numbers would scroll across the screen. I don’t know if you rang and spoke to someone, or rang different numbers for different acts. I expect it became the latter before the introduction of mobile phone voting around 2005. EDIT - A reminder, I could not vote back then. I was seeing the UK’s feed, so I’d see the phone numbers people in the UK could ring.
The first thing is, the competition requires money to operate. An enormous amount of money, since it is the biggest live music entertainment event in the world, run annually.
Second, charging a small amount per vote (and these days, tracking its source) is an effective element of countering vote-rigging at ground level. Higher level actions – like tweaking the whole voting scheme, which they did this year – are carried out to deal with higher level gaming like Israel’s last year (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9pxe4ngkjo)
I havn’t watched it in years but up until the 90s it was only vote by jury. Every participating country had one expert jury that voted and ranked the other countries.
This year voting at least in the UK was online only, via the official Eurovision website. No phoning, no text messages. For more details see here on the BBC website. I didn’t bother voting this year. In the past I have voted by phone.
I’m not fan of large numbers of votes being allowed per person. This can lead to vote manipulation and also pressurises people to pay more to vote. I’m not in favour of paying to vote at all, but understand why it happens. Though I’m not convinced it’s for all the right reasons.
I believe it was always the later. The number would have a suffix for each song, in the same order as they were shown in the contest. When you could vote by text in the UK it was the same sort of system except the suffix moved to the content of the text message.