Background.

One of the most discussed Junior Eurovision topics amongst both fans and press in recent years has been the online voting system and in particular the decision to allow viewers to vote for their own country.

Given how the public points awarded are calculated from these votes,  (% of votes = % of available points) – almost inevitably countries who enjoy high viewing figures find themselves at the top of the leader board and smaller countries are severely disadvantaged.

Proposal for change

1) Continue to allow viewers to vote for their own country but adopt a system very similar to ‘Adult’ ESC where the source location of the vote is recorded from IP address/location data.  This is presumably already in place to prevent voting multiple times

2) To continue allowing viewers in non participating countries to vote and in order to ensure the 50/50 Jury/Public vote points balance is maintained, an additional Rest of the World Jury would need to be assembled consisting of ‘experts’ and children from different non competing countries.

3) Votes from each participating country (and the ROW) are tallied separately and then converted to a 12 points, second 10 points etc.  These point scores from each participating country along with the ROW vote points are then combined and can be presented as a grand total for each entry, in the same manner as they currently are.

Benefits

This system allows the principle of voting for ones own country to remain whilst at the same time removing the inherent bias of the previous system which favours sheer quantity of votes cast.

Those voting in each country would only be able to contribute a maximum of 12 votes to the public total (assuming each country tops their own vote) and smaller countries are given a level playing field to compete.

Drawbacks

Administration for voting would be slightly more time consuming as each countries total votes would need to be separated.  This however should only be an issue during the live broadcast voting window.