Though it falls apart on closer scrutiny, the current Eurovision Song Contest voting system is like letting the House of Lords run the UK. Some obscure form of patronage selects five UK jurors - Mr. Adam Murray,Mr. Kojo Samuel, Mrs. Chandrika Darbari, Mrs. Louise Redknapp, and Mrs. Maia Beth - and they each rank all songs 1 to 24. That is converted to points 1-8 and 10 and 12. And our experts thus gave 12 points to Portugal, 10 to Switzerland, and 8 to Croatia.
Meanwhile anyone with a device in the UK could give points. First time voters included Andrew Neil, Martin Daubney, Laurence Fox and Tommy Robinson. When totted up, the UK public vote converted to 12 points for Israel, 10 for Ireland and 8 for Lithuania.
Across all contestants, the "music professionals" ranked Switzerland as the number one act with 365 points, ahead of France with 218 points. Israel was only 12th with 52 points. The popular vote ranked Croatia first with 337 points, ahead of Israel with 323 points and Ukraine in third with 307 points. France came fourth with 227 points while overall winner Switzerland was fifth with 226.
(Albania, France, Luxembourg, Israel & Switzerland gave the United Kingdom nothing at all in the televote.)
Members of the public could vote 20 times. I understand that's 20 times on each credit/debit card & as most people have more than one the figures can soon stack up and skew the vote, sometimes for political gain. The only reason for this system can be increased profit for Eurovision & it reminds me of the old days when record companies sent out people to bulk buy singles which got their artists into the charts.
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