The voting system in Sweden’s Melodifestivalen national final is supposedly a 50/50 split, with jurors and televoters giving out an equal number of points. But when the two groups use entirely different systems to award their votes, do things really play out so evenly in the show itself?

In a post I wrote on a fan forum the other day, I tried to explain why and how the app vote is hurting televote power at Melodifestivalen, turning the finals into a jury-dominated affair. Now, however, I’ve spent some time going over the stats to try and prove things a little more conclusively, and to show what the app vote is doing to the vote split in Sweden.

To give a bit of a frame of reference, I’ve looked over the split jury/televote scores for 2011-2015 (following the start of the international juries, but before the introduction of the app vote in finals) and 2016-2017 (after the app vote’s introduction). I’ve then taken a bit of a look at the changes set to come in this year to see what effect, if any, they’ll have on changing the effective jury–televote split.

What’s the app vote done so far?

First, I gathered all of the televote and jury vote scores from the 2011-2017 period, then found the standard deviation data for each using Excel. I’m no expert statistician, but this seemed like a reasonable way to measure voting power: if a set of votes rates higher for standard deviations, it means there’s more distance between each song’s total score, and therefore that said set of votes has had a larger influence on the final result. As such, I considered this figure to represent voting power.

Next, I compared this data between the jury and the televote for each year. As an example, if the jury votes came in at 20 standard deviations for a year and the televotes were at 30, then I took that to mean that the televotes were spaced out by 50% more than the jury votes, and therefore held 50% more voting power, giving them a 60-40 split in their favour. Repeating this for each of the seven years in question gave the following results:

I think this is a fairly clear representation of how, for the last couple of years, the jury vote has massively outpowered the televote. Previously, the televote’s proportional system gave it a slight edge over the juries, averaging out to about a 55–45 effective split… but as soon as the app votes were introduced, the televotes clustered and lost their power, making the split roughly 24-76 in favour of juries. This is similar to the conclusion of a 22-78 split that I reached in my more simple earlier post.

Seeing the relative consistency in the split both before and after the app vote introduction shows that this is obviously no coincidence. For five years in a row, the televote’s power hovered at a steady fifty-something percent – and then, immediately following the change, plunged to sub-25% for two years running. But what about 2018? Well, that brings us to the next question…

Are the changes to jury votes going to help with this?

In an effort to return some power to the televoters, SVT has announced a slight change to this year’s voting system. While juries previously awarded points to the twelve songs in a format of 12-10-8-6-4-2-1, they must now spread their votes more evenly across the field by using the standard Eurovision system (the televotes are then scaled up linearly, by about 35%, to remain nominally even with the total jury vote). Here’s another way to look at it:

Since the jury has to award more points overall but can’t give any more than previously to their top favourites, this change forces them to score more evenly across the board, partially replicating the effect that the app vote has on the televotes. But is it enough?

To find out, I converted the 2016-2017 jury scores into the new 2018 system (2011-2015, which had no app-vote in the finals, was left as-is to allow for comparison). This involved simply converting up for the most part (e.g. 6s became 7s, 4s became 6s etc. as per above), but there were also three new entries that had to be awarded points per jury – the three that were just below the cut-off line for points, scoring 8th, 9th and 10th.

Obviously, we have no information on what these scores would have been, so I’ve filled them in semi-randomly while favouring the more successful entries. The goal here was to replicate as closely as possible what the official results would’ve been under the 2018 system. As such, my approach was to assume that e.g. an overall jury second-placer would be more likely to get points than an overall tenth-placer, but also that not every last-place entry would be in last with every juror.

Combining these new converted scores with our previous standard deviation formulas for calculating the televote–jury split gives us the following:

So what does that show? Well, it’s clearly an improvement: from the data we have so far, we can expect this latest voting system change to shift the effective televote–jury power balance from roughly 24-76 to 30-70. But that, quite clearly, remains far from the goal of an effective 50/50 split. If SVT still wants the televotes to matter, they’ll need to start thinking of some more changes – either to how the votes are combined or, more directly, to the app voting system itself. There are plenty of ways that either option could be done while keeping app engagement high, if that’s what SVT wants.

For anyone who might want to see more about how I reached these conclusions (or just pick holes in my reasoning), you can look at all of the raw data in my Excel file, or just leave me a comment – I’m always happy to somewhat-pointlessly overanalyse Eurovision stuff!