> Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.

Quite the opposite. It's exactly the decentralisation of the vote that caused this.

In the past, when one person or committee per country voted, only the UK and Germany voted disproportionally for each other. After the switch to public voting, lots of countries now vote for their neighbours. Clearly, the general public is less cosmopolitan than that committee, and tends to vote for countries they know or feel related to, or understand the music or cultural references from.

The public is voting and has been for 20 years. This isn't organized collusion, this is people liking their neighbors betters.

People have always been giving more points to their neighbors on average, but not always. In case you don't know, each country gives more than one "vote", ie they assign 12 points to one country, 10 to another, 9 to yet another etc. Usually the 12 go to the sister country (ie US-Canada type relationships), but the rest would be spend in a reasonably fair way.

Please note that while from 1998 to 2008 (the peak years of this contest popularity-wise imo) almost 100% of the vote was coming from the audience (via paid SMS and calls). From 2009 to 2012 audience only accounted for 50% of the votes, the rest was picked by the Eurovision company. From 2012 on, the audience had no real effect on the votes. This is also when things started getting seriously political (Conchita, Ukraine, Russia etc).

It's interesting because I just noticed that the Eurovision followed the same path as most social media during the same timeframe. Trying to make you think you have a choice while you don't, trying to fake popularity as a means of enforcing some agenda etc.

As I understand it currently 50% of the votes come from the public, 50% from judges. Is this not correct ?

That is correct.

There are some small exceptions, such as in San Marino, where their small population (~32,000) and sharing of phone infrastructure with Italy makes it difficult to calculate a valid independent televote. And televotes can sometimes be ruled invalid by the auditor (PwC) if their auditing suggests it has been manipulated.

https://eurovoix.com/2017/03/08/san-marino-ebu-rejects-broad...

And sometimes it's the jury votes that are ruled invalid. This happened in 2015 when both FYR Macedonia and Montenegro were 100% televote:

https://eurovision.tv/story/full-voting-results-revealed-by-...

They had this for a while and it was even more partisan, though I believe the main effect was emigrants voting for their home country (Britain voting for Ireland, Germany voting for Turkey etc).

>Public online poll

What could go wrong?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTqIyx6tBU

Decentralize the vote to the public if you want to see botnets voting. No thanks.

Voting is done by phone or SMS and costs a couple of cents. As far as I know, it's totally legal to vote more, but that means you pay more.

I think this should be changed. I cannot imagine that this pay-to-win mechanic has any positive effects.

Usually it's more than a few cents (i think 0.5 to 2 euros). This is actually a great way to vote and fund the contest at the same time. There's little financial incentive to cheat (it's not like a lottery) so if you spend more money, on average, you care more. Also the amount each individual spends in generally very small (ie a handful of votes) so it's about as democratic as this can get without involving some kind of state-id based authentication.

Also worth pointing out there is a cap on the number of votes you can make (maximum 20), and a time limit of 10 - 15 minutes during which you're able to vote. So no one can vote without paying, but they can't spend more than $8 USD on votes either. (In Australia, a vote costs 55c, about 40c US.)

Of course there's people who can try buying SIM cards & running bots, but in theory that's what the PwC vote auditing and Digame's systems are meant to detect & block.

I did not know any of this. Thank you for adding this.

Would you say the same thing about actual elections? Should billionairres be allowed to buy millions of votes because they care more? Should nations buy votes as a from of propaganda?

The stakes for Eurovision are about as low as a doorstop. If someone cares about it as much as they do about national elections, well quite frankly they deserve the opportunity to buy the vote :) there’s worse things people can obsess about.

It’s a game, it’s a show. Technically, so are politics, but so far Eurovision has not cost any human lives, nor have pensions evaporated. To my knowledge.

Then again, judging by the reaction of some people, that might change soon :)

Real elections have real stakes. Eurovision is just a song contest. Who really cares who wins? You get some glory, and in exchange you have to organise the event the next year.

During the 1990s, Ireland won so much that at some point they were hoping to lose, because they couldn't afford to win again.

But win a real election and you get to set laws and make decisions worth billions of dollars, and influence the lives of millions of people. They couldn't be more different.

Well it does discourage bots, and it finances the contest. I don't really see big downsides, as it's not very expensive either.

That's a technical issue that can be worked on if such will is there.