Eurovision 2004 - Televoting Watch
Bang the gong! Finally, it had to happen. We've gone full televote. 100% of the vote in this year's final came from the public. The juries were there but only to provide a back-up in the case of a technical problem or unforeseen circumstances.
That's going to make my analysis of this year's final a little more boring than usual. However there are a couple of points of note.
First - of course - there's a semi-final to look at as well, and in that a back-up jury was used. Monaco and Croatia both had issues with their phone networks. The Croatian mobile service provider had forgotten to delete votes for their own country. These were recalculated without those votes, and the remaining televote went forward, so the Croatian backup jury wasn't used. However the Monaco jury did have their verdicts included in the result, as the problems affecting their televote couldn't be fixed.
Having just a single jury vote to compare doesn't really lead to any well-founded conclusions, but it is possible to have a look at the running order biases.
After experimenting (successfully!) with the reverse recap in 2002 and 2003, the EBU have removed it from 2004. We're back to a standard running order recap and it shows. Both the Monegasque back-up jury and the televote heavily favoured the second-half of the running order in the semi-final. Even though Ukraine and Greece were in the first-half, none of the first seven countries on stage qualified. This bias is probably due in large part to the random running order placing several of the weaker songs towards the start, but even so, around 60% of both the jury and televote went to the second-half countries.
Having a semi-final allows us to see the relative strengths of the two halves of the draw for the first time - which gives added context to the outcome.
In the final, both of the big two from the semi-final (Ukraine and Serbia & Montenegro) were drawn in the first half. Even with this advantage, the first half barely exceeded the second half in the televote 52%-48%. It's going to take a few more years of reverting to non-reverse recaps to see if the effect is noticeable again. I'm already missing it.
One other point of note. Even though all competing countries could vote in both the semi-final and the final, leading to higher scores all round, there were three fewer countries voting in the semi than in the final. This was because of France, Poland and Russia not broadcasting the semi-final on the grounds that they weren't in it and interest was low. Some countries just take longer to get it than others...
Despite there being more voting points than ever that doesn't mean that countries receiving zero-points can't happen. And it did happen this year. Commiserations to Switzerland - the first ever country to get zero points in a Eurovision semi-final!
