I’m a huge fan of the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Oslo this past weekend. The production values put anything on Canadian or American TV to shame; getting through 25 songs in less than 2 hours is amazing as well! If you’d like to know more about the Contest, the wikipedia page is quite good.
The Eurovision uses what is known as a Borda count to tabulate scores. Each country allocates points to their 10 favourites. However, rather than allocate 10 points to the frst ranked and 9 to the second, first place earns 12 points; 2nd 10 points. The idea is to skew the vote in favour of top-ranked scores…and to reduce the possibility of tie scores (there’ve been two ties in 55 years).
Using the awesome data available from here I yanked the Borda count down to a normal count. Pretty simple really: convert the 10 point allocations to 9, the 12 point ones to 10. Doesn’t change the results, but does give a clearer idea of how closely the songs scored.
Semi-final one: (Note the gap between Iceland and Portugal – 32 points)
Belgium 152
Greece 128
Iceland 118
Portugal 86
Russia 74
Serbia 74
Albania 71
Bosnia & Herzegovina 57
Belarus 57
Moldova 52
Finland 48
Poland 44
Malta 43
Estonia 39
F.Y.R. Macedonia 34
Slovakia 24
Latvia 11
Semi-final two: (note how closely Azerbaijan, Romania, Georgia and Denmark are clustered)
Turkey 111
Azerbaijan 104
Romania 101
Georgia 99
Denmark 96
Armenia 76
Ukraine 75
Israel 69
Ireland 64
Cyprus 64
Sweden 57
Lithuania 42
Croatia 31
The Netherlands 29
Bulgaria 19
Slovenia 6
Switzerland 2
Final: (Germany still wins by 6o+ margin; Turkey and Romania much closer; places 4 through 9 separated by 8 points)
Germany 223
Turkey 159
Romania 156
Denmark 138
Azerbaijan 136
Belgium 135
Armenia 134
Greece 131
Georgia 131
Ukraine 106
Russia 83
France 82
Israel 69
Serbia 68
Spain 66
Albania 59
Bosnia & Herzegovina 48
Portugal 43
Iceland 41
Norway 35
Moldova 26
Cyprus 25
Ireland 25
Belarus 16
United Kingdom 10
