We’ll have help for all this from some wonderful visualizations Chris did today. He made a couple of different ones. To play with one of them yourself, click here. It’s interactive; for example,  click on the country names to see the lines for those countries highlighted in the chart).

He also did another one and exported some key things as static graphics for me to include in this post.  When Chris talks about his visualizations in general,  his stock phrase is “visualizations put ideas in your head.” What’s striking is that after seeing his visualizations, it will definitely put ideas in your head about the consequences of what can  happen with ranked voting systems, which can lead losers to come out OK, and winners to pop up unexpectedly.

BTW, I should point out that “jury” in the graphics below refers to the professional jury that each country sends to Eurovision. The jury judges a separate performance done only for them on the day before the live Final is telecast. The “televoting” public uses their cell phone to vote immediately following the live Final performance.  Each set of rankings (the jury and the televote) is then combined to come up with the final rankings and the overall winner.  The new wrinkle this year is that the jury stuff was all announced separately from the televote, in part to avoid any country winding up with the dreaded “null” score.  And indeed, no country ended up with 0 points.

So — to the results. At Saturday’s Eurovision Final (telecast live, even in the USA this year!), Ukraine was crowned the surprising winner. The odds on favorite (literally, with the odds makers) was Russia, followed by Australia, who respectively came in 3rd and 2nd.

Yes, I know. Australia? In a European contest? It’s a long story related to them competing last year as part of some special anniversary thing that I don’t recall right now. Let’s just say they have now stretched the definition of “European country” by quite a bit.

But I digress.

A couple of striking things that emerge from the visualizations that Chris did on how the voting shook out:

1.  Ukraine won neither the jury vote, nor the public televote. But, when the two sets where combined, Ukraine won it all.

Ukraine – Eurovision 2016 results

2. The Top 10 Jury picks vs the Top 10 Televote picks are remarkably different.

Here’s the Top 10 from the Jury:

Jury Top 10 = Eurovision 2016

And here’s the Top 10 from the Televote:

Televote Top 10 = Eurovision 2016

3. When the results are combined, there are some unexpected (to me) adjustments in the overall results.  Note how Poland came in almost last in the Jury ranking, but their Televote rank was so much higher that they wound up in the top 10 overall:

Poland – Eurovision 2016 results

4. Croatia, on the other hand, finished lower in the final rankings than in either of the Jury or Televote lists:

Croatia – Eurovision 2016 results

5. The final results are not a simple calculation of the rank order, but rather a points-based voting with points assigned based on rank. Chris did a version of the results that have horizontal bars underneath the country names. These bars show the percentage of the points that each country got, and it’s interesting to note that the winning percentage was 15% or less.

Eurovision 2016 full results

Anyway, I thought it was quite interesting to see these.  Thanks, Chris, for letting me share these and the interaction one on the blog today! :-0

BTW, there was an odd semi-scandal of a sort connected to the results. Apparently the Danish jury member who filled out Denmark’s score card accidentally filled out their choices backwards, giving 12 points (top score) to Ukraine, when they’d really wanted to give Ukraine 0 points. Oy. According to the article I saw, though, that wouldn’t have made any difference to the overall winner.  But still – there always has to be something wacky at Eurovision;  glad to see that even though they changed the scoring system, some things never change.

Actually, I hadn’t realized until now that I’d not even written anything about last year’s Eurovision 2015 competition. We were travelling a bunch around that time, I guess. But Chris and I actually watched the semi-finals on our laptops last year, as we were in a room without a TV. We didn’t see the complete final “live” (on the laptop), though, as we opted that evening to dine out and have a spectacular Italian seafood meal at our favorite restaurant, rather than sit at home and watch the Eurovision 2015 finals.

I know, I know, priorities. What can I say.

Anyway, this year’s contest is now less than 2 months away, and I guess most of the countries have picked their entries by now, including Germany. For each of the past few years, Germany has been holding a TV contest to pick their entry. However, as readers of my old blog might recall, that system hit an unexpected snag when the winner – who was incredibly popular with the audience the night of the contest – declined to perform at Eurovision and withdrew from the contest just after he won. It was all quite strange. The loser then became the new winner – i.e. the singer who was NOT popular with the German song contest audience got sent to Eurovision. Unfortunately, she went on to crash and burn rather spectacularly at Eurovision, when she and her song were “awarded” the dreaded NULL points. I.e., she scored zero points. Eurovision 2015 wound up being a big disaster for Germany all the way round.

So for the 2016 contest, the Germany organizers perhaps very sensibly decided to ditch the contest idea and just have a committee pick their 2016 entry without holding a contest.

Now, other countries do this, including England. But it hasn’t worked out well for England —  recent Eurovision results for England’s entries have been less than stellar. The use of a secret committee to pick the entry had actually become a bit of a sore point in England, to the point where this year England switched to holding a contest.

Which is, as I’ve said, what Germany used to do. But after last year’s debacle, a committee got together and selected a singer (and a song) to send to Eurovision 2016. They announced their selection — and then all hell broke loose.  The singer  turned out to be rather notoriously racist, sexist, xenophoic, homophobic …   well, you get the idea. Not exactly a great choice to send to a contest that celebrates the idea of uniting the world through song.

So, the committee withdrew their selection, and then announced they’d have a contest after all. The winner turned out to be a 17-year old girl who had previously won the German version of a TV-show contest called The Voice, and she’s going to sing a song in English called Ghost.

Personally, the song isn’t my cup-of-tea, but I put it on and listened to it in the background as I typed up this post. Then – as they say in all the click-bait headlines on the Internet — something weird happened. I actually thought I’d clicked on the wrong thing and was listening to a song from a couple of years ago called Only Teardrops. Ghost sounds that similar to me. If you watch the videos you might not heard the similarities at first. But they are darn similar if you just listen to them without getting distracted by the the odd staging used for each song.

Anyway, Only Teardrops won it all back in 2013. So does Germany have more than a Ghost of a chance of winning this year?

Stay tuned…

———–

Song links:

• Ghost, Germany’s 2016 entry
• Only Teardrops, Denmark’s winning 2013 entry
• Cake to Bake, Latvia’s Eurovision 2014, and my all-time favorite of the recent shows
  — OK, this one  has nothing to do with anything else in this post, but I wanted to leave you with a cute song to end on,  so those other ones don’t get stuck in your head.
  You’re welcome.