The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest is selected by a positional voting system. The most recent system was implemented in the , and sees each participating country award two sets of 12, 10, 8–1 points to their ten favourite songs: one set from their professional jury and the other from televoting, with only televoting used in the semi-finals, and both jury and televoting in the final.
Overview
Small, demographically-balanced juries made up of ordinary people had been used to rank the entries, but after the widespread use of telephone voting in the contest organizers resorted to juries only in the event of a televoting malfunctions. In , Eircom's telephone polling system malfunctioned. Irish broadcaster RTÉ did not receive the polling results from Eircom in time, and substituted votes by a panel of judges. Between 1997 and 2003 (the first years of televoting), lines were opened to the public for only five minutes after the performance and recap of the final song. Between 2004 and 2006, the lines were opened for ten minutes, and from 2007 to 2009, they were opened for fifteen minutes. In 2010, viewers were allowed to vote during the performances, but this was rescinded for the 2012 contest. Since the , the presenters will start the televoting window with the phrase "Europe, start voting now!". This invitation also applies to from to ("Europe and Australia, start voting now!"), and to the non-participating countries from 2023 onwards ("Europe, Australia, and the rest of the world, start voting now!"). At the end of the voting period, the presenters will invite viewers and the audience to stop with a ten-second final countdown along with the phrase "Europe, stop voting now!". The United Kingdom is not able to vote via SMS or the smartphone app due to legislation implemented after the 2007 British premium-rate phone-in scandal.
The BBC contacted regional juries by telephone to choose the winners, and the European Broadcasting Union (producers of the contest) later began contacting international juries by telephone. This method continued to be used until 1993. The following year saw the first satellite link-up to juries.
To announce the votes, the contest's presenters connect by satellite to each country in turn and inviting a spokesperson to read the country's votes in French or English. The presenters originally repeated the votes in both languages, but since the votes have been translated due to time constraints. To offset increased voting time required by a larger number of participating countries, since 2006 only countries' 8-, 10-, and 12-point scores were read aloud; one- to seven-point votes were added automatically to the scoreboard while each country's spokesperson was introduced. The scoreboard displays the number of points each country has received and, since , a progress bar indicating the number of countries which have voted. Since , only the 12-point score is read aloud due to the new voting system, meaning that the nine scoring countries were added automatically to the scoreboard (1-8 and 10 points). In addition, the televoting points were combined and the presenters announced them in order, starting from the country with the lowest score and ending with the country with the highest score from the televoting. Beginning with the , the televoting points are announced by the presenters based on the juries' rankings in reverse order.
Voting systems
The most-used voting system (other than the current one) was last used for the . This system was used from 1957 to 1961 and from 1967 to 1969. Ten jurors in each country each cast one vote for their favourite song. In 1969 this resulted in a four-way tie for first place (between the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Spain), with no tie-breaking procedure. A second round of voting in the event of a tie was introduced to this system the following year.
From 1962 to 1966, a voting system similar to the current one was used. In 1962, each country awarded its top three 1, 2 and 3 points; in 1963 the top five were awarded 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 points, and from 1964 to 1966, each country usually awarded its top three 1, 3 and 5 points. With the latter system, a country could choose to give points to two countries instead of three (giving 3 to one and 6 to the other); in 1965, Belgium awarded the United Kingdom 6 points and Italy 3. Although it was possible to give one country 9 points, this never occurred.