Eurovision Begins Its Long Argument About How to Count the Votes

MAY 15 2007 · 12:10

EBU · 2007 Placement: Institutional · Venue: — · Host: Helsinki, Finland · Type: voting drama · Broadcast: HD Eurovision 2007 in Helsinki ran under a televote-only scoring system, as the contest had since 1998, and the result was widely considered an inflection point for the EBU. Serbia won and the scoreboard appeared to many Western European broadcasters to be dominated by geographic and diaspora voting blocs: ex-Yugoslav states rewarding ex-Yugoslav states, post-Soviet states clustering together, the Nordics trading, the Balkans trading harder. The BBC and several other Western delegations reportedly escalated complaints through the Reference Group, and the ensuing internal debate triggered the long redesign that would reshape Eurovision voting for the next two decades. In 2009 the EBU reintroduced national juries alongside televoting in a 50/50 split. In 2016 the system split again into separate jury and televote reveals — the dramatic two-stage reveal now considered definitive of modern Eurovision broadcasts. 2007 is reportedly the moment the televote-only experiment ended, even though the rule changes themselves landed later. Context The televote-only system had been phased in over the late 1990s as the EBU embraced audience democratisation. By 2007 the contest had expanded to 42 countries, the semi-final system was in its second year, and voting patterns had become visibly geographic in a way that public-vote-only counting could not correct for. Juries had existed in Eurovision's earlier decades and their reintroduction was reportedly framed internally as a restoration rather than an invention. Legacy The 2007-2009 transition is now widely considered the pivot between 20th-century Eurovision (televote-only, single semi-final, producer-driven) and 21st-century Eurovision (jury-plus-televote, two semi-finals, data-reveal spectacle). The 2016 split-reveal system — where jury points are announced first by spokespeople and televote points are dropped in a single bloc at the end — has become one of the most-imitated broadcast inventions in international television and is directly descended from the conversations that began around Helsinki. Mythology The 2007 contest is sometimes described as having introduced juries; it did not — 2009 did. Serbia's 2007 win is also sometimes described as having been 'overturned' by the rule change; it was not, and Marija Šerifović's victory remains fully canonical.