Voting at the Eurovision Song Contest

The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest is selected by a positional voting system. Each country awards two sets of 12, 10, 8–1 points to their 10 favourite songs: one from their professional jury and the other from televoting. The current system has been in place since 2016.

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 1998 the contest organizers resorted to juries only in the event of a televoting malfunctions. In 2003, Eircom's telephone polling system malfunction. 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 10 minutes, and from 2007 to 2009 they were opened for 15 minutes. In 2010 viewers were allowed to vote during the performances, but this was rescinded for the 2012 contest.

The BBC contacted regional juries by telephone to choose the 1956 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 linkup 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 2004 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' eight-, 10-, and 12-point scores are read aloud; one- to seven-point votes are added automatically to the scoreboard while each country's spokesperson is introduced. The scoreboard displays the number of points each country has received and, since 2008, a progress bar indicating the number of countries which have voted.

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