25. May 2026
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Why I Did not like the ESC 2026 public vote – and how I would change it

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

Saturday, 16th May 2026, in the middle of the night in Vienna. Germany, the United Kingdom and Belgium shared the same faith. Zero points from the public. Nobody loves you? The show hosts were not tired to say that this “only” means that you did not make it into the Top 10 of any of the global votes. Nonetheless, zero points is a harsh and tough statement. I again felt that this vote is not working. Not because “my” country Germany did not make it, just because it is not fair in my point of view. Thus, I felt to blog about the public vote at the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC).

 

Public Vote vs. Jury Vote at the Eurovision Song Contest

Determining the winner at the Eurovision Song Contest currently is a rather straight process. Any of the participating countries, including the ones who failed in the semifinal(s) are allowed the vote. The Top 10 songs per country are given points, in the staggering 12-10 and 8 down to 1. Thereby, any country has in fact two votes, one with a previously assigned jury (the jury vote) and one done by the spectators (the public vote). You cannot vote for your own country, obviously. Vienna 2026 had 35 participants, 25 of them competing in the finals. In general the jury and the public vote points count the same. However, there are two “advantages” for the public vote:

  • There is also an additional combined public vote for all countries which did not compete in that year, including countries which are not in Eurovision scope, like the USA. Thus, in Vienna, there were 36 public voting blocks and 35 jury votes.
  • In case of a tie of the combined score, the higher public vote decides the winner.

Thus, in theory, the maximum possible score a contestant could reach in Vienna was 12 points * (34 jury votes + 35 public votes) = 828 points. Under that circumstance, the winning score of 516 for Bulgaria is rather impressing.

 

Why The Public Vote is Even More Important

I looked at the last ten ESC winners. My focus was the distribution of jury and public points in the total score.

Year Winning Country Jury Points Public Points Total Public %
2026 Bulgaria 204 312 516 60.5%
2025 Austria 258 178 436 40.8%
2024 Switzerland 365 226 591 38.2%
2023 Sweden 340 265 605 43.8%
2022 Ukraine 192 439 631 69.6%
2021 Italy 206 318 524 60.7%
2019 Netherlands 237 261 498 52.4%
2018 Israel 212 317 529 59.9%
2017 Portugal 382 376 758 49.6%
2016 Ukraine 211 323 534 60.5%

In seven cases, the winning song received more points from the public vote than from the jury. The difference is much higher than you would expect from the additional public vote. I did a similar analysis, summing up the points of the Top 5 ranked songs and again determining the share of public vote points to the total ones:

Year Top 5 Jury Points Top 5 Televote Points Top 5 Total Points Public Vote Pct
2016 1006 1098 2104 52.19%
2017 1096 1358 2454 55.34%
2018 929 1026 1955 52.48%
2019 826 1197 2023 59.17%
2021 1016 1181 2197 53.76%
2022 1051 1255 2306 54.42%
2023 895 1194 2089 57.16%
2024 991 1420 2411 58.90%
2025 701 1025 1726 59.39%
2026 690 1033 1723 59.95%
Total 9201 11787 20988 56.16%

In any of the last ten editions (2020 did not take place due to Covid-19)), the top 5 song in total always received more points from the public vote than from the jury vote. With a mean of 56 per cent. I did this analysis and statistics after I started working on this post. However, it in the range I expected. I will explain the reason in the next chapter.

 

Why I Feel That Public Vote Should Be Reformed?

At first sight, it feels like each country is doing two sets of points, based on different people and expertise. However, they also do it in fact on a very different voting system (which also explains the expectation I mentioned above. Let’s have a deeper look:

 

How The Jury Vote is Working

In 2026, each national jury consisted of seven members. These were disclosed after the competition, but should be confidential beforehand. The members are music professionals, but also diverse in their compositions. Thus, there may be music professionals, music journalists, but also music teachers are possible. Two jury members at least have to be between 18 and 25 years old. They should obviously not be connected to any participating artist or songwriter. They have to rank all songs individually and independently, based on rehearsal sessions of the shows. Based on that ranking, the national head of the jury transforms these votes into the points given by that country (see also Rules of the Contest by the EBU).

 

How The Public Vote is Working

The mechanisms of the public vote are rather straight-forward. Based on your geographical location, you are voting for your favorite song. The result of all votes of a country or the Rest of the World voting determines a ranking, on which the typical points are given.

There are a few details worth mentioning:

  • You may typically vote by phone call, text message or the Eurovision app
  • The maximum number of votes one can give has recently been reduced to ten
  • The votes are charged. The price per vote differs from country to country and differs significantly by country. In 2026 Finland was the most expansive country with 1.50 EUR / vote, while Denmark was the cheapest (0.13 EUR / vote). You can find a nice overview (in Finnish language) in this X post. In English, there is a Reddit post about the 2025 situation.

Unfortunately, there is very little reliable data about the votes in regards of the number of votes and distribution. For the 2025 ESC, the website ESCInsight estimated a total of 17m votes all over Europe. I found similar ballpark figures in other sources as well. The post also estimates the number of voters by country. According to their model, there were over four million voters each from Germany and the United Kingdom, which is by far the largest number. Countries like Montenegro, Moldova, or Georgia come with less than 5,000 votes each, according to that source.

There is no information which method people typically use for voting. In May 2026, the Spanish newspaper El Pais released a report that for the 2025 vote in Spain, the distribution was:

  • 7,283 phone calls (5 %)
  • 23,840 text messages (17 %)
  • 111,565 online votes (78 %)

I would guess, though that the shares differ between the costs for the different votes.

 

Public Vote Mechanism and Topics

There are two key topics I would like to discuss about the public vote and the national public voting results. However, both come with limited authorized available information.

Split Voting

One of my favorite statements about the public vote is If everybody in a country thinks you did the second best song, you will receive zero points. The idea behind that is, however, that people don’t split their votes. Having up to ten votes available, however, does give you the opportunity to give some votes to one song and a little less to your almost-as-much beloved track (or even to three or more songs).

There are just estimates about how many viewers do this vote splitting. Most agree that a split vote is extremely unusual under “casual” ESC viewers. However, there is a certain popularity for it among ESC fans. For vote-splitters, my statement above might not be true. If everybody did vote-splitting and had the same favorite and second favorite song, you would end up with 10 points from that region. There are estimates that between 20 and 40 per cent of the votes do vote splitting (which might also suggest that it is majorly the ESC community delivering the votes).

 

Distribution of Votes over the Different Nations

I start this section with another statement, which is a fact and not an opinion: If you are eleventh placed in the public votes of any country, you will end up with zero points from that category globally. This is fact, only the first ten countries receive points. The more, it is interesting how big the voting gaps between a place in the points like the eighth or ninth place and a spot right outside these ranks, e.g. eleventh or twelfth, in regards of votes really is.

Unfortunately, there is just very limited public voting data in regards of total number of votes for a country. The best data comes from Italy. I give you a few sources in here:

Especially the distribution of votes chart

Distribution in Italian televote over the placements of the different songs (click on chart for souce)

 

In comparison, I used the official 2026 figures from RAI and used the ESCInsight estimate from 2025 that there are about 1.1 million televotes from Italy. I also added the cumulated pct., i.e. the share of votes given up to this place. The value for Albania, for example, is the share of votes for the four most popular songs in the Italian vote:

Country Votes Pct. of Votes Cummulated
1 Moldavia 241.780 21,98% 21,98%
2 Romania 155.540 14,14% 36,12%
3 Israel 125.070 11,37% 47,49%
4 Albania 116.490 10,59% 58,08%
5 Ukraine 112.310 10,21% 68,29%
6 Bulgaria 81.950 7,45% 75,74%
7 Greece 31.570 2,87% 78,61%
8 Finland 25.960 2,36% 80,97%
9 Poland 23.760 2,16% 83,13%
10 Australia 22.220 2,02% 85,15%
11 Croatia 21.120 1,92% 87,07%
12 Serbia 19.250 1,75% 88,82%
13 France 17.820 1,62% 90,44%
14 Malta 16.280 1,48% 91,92%
15 Germany 11.880 1,08% 93,00%
16 Denmark 11.660 1,06% 94,06%
17 Norway 11.660 1,06% 95,12%
18 Cyprus 10.890 0,99% 96,11%
19 Switzerland 10.120 0,92% 97,03%
20 Czechia 8.800 0,80% 97,83%
21 Lithuania 6.600 0,60% 98,43%
22 Austria 6.050 0,55% 98,98%
23 Belgium 5.720 0,52% 99,50%
24 United Kingdom 5.280 0,48% 99,98%

You see that there is a massive concentration of votes on the top songs. 58% of the votes are given to the first four songs, 75% to the Top 6. The tail is very flat, which means that the difference between zero points and four or five may be marginal, especially in a smaller country. This is a key disadvantage of the public vote compared to the jury vote, where you have to give a ranking for each and every song. If you are last in a country’s jury vote, these expert really judged that your song has been the worst of that day. If you get zero points in the public vote, it finally just tells you that you just very rarely made it to the very top of the people’s minds. You might still be one of their favorites.

 

Public Vote Issues

Of course, people in other countries than Italy might vote for other songs and countries. However, I feel that the general characteristics how the public vote distributes over songs will be very similar – at least, if you assume that there are just fair votes without the intention of manipulation. To me the key issues with the public votes are:

  • The televoting concentrates too much on the people’s favorite. Already in the lower points area of each participating country, the voting result becomes vague. Of course, the spotlights should be on the winner, but currently, the worst song in the ranking might not actually be the worst song in the mind of the people worldwide, who participated in the vote, including the jury.
  • As mentioned, the public vote is likely already significantly more important than the jury vote. I feel you should try to reduce the points you get from a public vote. Currently telling the people that they are equal is not based on statistical evidence.
  • Manipulation is a big topic. There are some mechanisms against vote manipulation. But being a safe public vote winner in a country by “creating” some 1,000 votes there (if you for example look at the Azerbaijan estimate of 1,500 votes total in the ESCInsight post) feels very tempting. We already saw the last year that the ESC is becoming a “social media battle” two or three weeks before the final. In that context, voting fees of up to 1.50 EUR per vote make the people worse. You have to be a real die-hard ESC nerd if you pay 15 Euro for ten votes in Finland.
  • It is also uncertain how many votes one person can in fact do without major effort. The online vote (at least in Germany) is limiting you to ten votes per payment card, the text message voting is by cell phone and you could use your mainline phone for the phone-based voting.

I do understand that the organizing body EBU is shy of publishing detailed figures about the public vote. It may give people hints how to manipulate voting efficiently in financial and resource effort. On the other hand, you might also be able to detect fraud, e.g. by using data analytics experts.

 

How Would I Alter The Public Vote

I feel that there should still be a jury and public vote. The jury leads to a certain stability. I can neither judge whether the countries did sensible jury in the past or whether jury members were known before the competition. On the public vote side, I would ask people to generally vote for their favorite three songs. The first placed song might receive a stronger weight than the others. I like this idea because it puts the public vote on a wider foundation.

If I look at my statement above, a song regarded second best by all voters (and having a common favorite) will become second in the public vote, just as you would love to have it. I would also expect that there is a weaker share of votes on a few top songs, so that the result for the less popular songs is more precise. It may be that a vote for multiple songs may be difficult by phone voting, but this kind of public vote becomes less important anyway. It should be no issue for text and online voting.

 

Increase The Participation

Additionally, I would try to push for lower voting prices. More votes means less opportunity to have fraudulent votes. It also leads to more precise and more widely accepted results. The results should also be shared in detail, at least as percentages as the Italian RAI is doing. Also the idea of having three songs you have to pick makes manipulation more difficult. If you want to systematically support a certain contestant, you at least have to choose a second and third song as well. Irregularities in votes might be much easier to detect with modern data analytics methods.

What do you think about these ideas? Happy to discuss with you…

 

All “classic” blog posts

No reviews – just debating and certain topics. These are my “traditional” blog posts in the categories Just blogging, Just blogging on music and Sports Blogging:

 

Eurovision Song Contest

Here are all postings related to the Eurovision Song Contest:

 

The title picture has been created using ChatGPT.

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