“How much is seven in France?”: A Eurovision Special Continued

Had they sung last instead of first, poor Karin
might have had an easier time with the translations

Voting in the Eurovision is the most exciting part of the night, or at least it is until one song trounces the rest into submission with a dozen countries still to vote. Anyway, the awarding of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and the famous "douze points" was introduced in 1975. However, the points were awarded in the order in which the songs were performed, rather than going in order from a jury's 10th favourite to most favourite. This must have made for a number of anti-climactic results, as the winning entry that year, "Ding-A-Dong" by Teach-In of the Netherlands, was sung first, and got the top score from six countries. The night's host, Karin Falck, doubtless the only one confused by the odd method of awarding 12 votes, then 2, then 6, then 4, as opposed to going in order from tenth favourite to most favoured. Having struggled between English and French translations through the voting, she hit a blank when the United Kingdom gave seven votes to Sweden, and couldn't remember the French for seven, prompting her to ask the scrutineer from the European Broadcasting Union "How much is seven in France?". The awarding of votes in numerical order, rather than the order in which songs were performed, was first done in 1980.

André Claveau: the 1958 Danish jury
really liked his effort, except one guy,
 who thought it was only "alright"

Before 1975, a number of scoring systems were used, though the most popular one involved each country having ten jurors on a panel, with each juror giving a vote to their favourite song. Of course, that theoretically meant one jury could give all ten of its votes to a country, or one jury could give a single vote to ten countries. This never happened, but in 1958, Denmark gave nine of its ten votes to France while, in the same Contest, Sweden gave four votes to Switzerland and one vote to each of Italy, France, Denmark, Belgium, West Germany and Austria. In 1970, Belgium helped Ireland to victory by giving Dana's "All Kinds of Everything" nine votes.

From 1964 to 1966, each jury voted privately, as normal, but only awarded points to the top three songs, with the favourite song getting five points, the second favourite getting three, and the third favourite getting one. However, if the jury liked fewer than three songs, they could vote for just two songs, and award their favourite song six points and their second favourite three. If the ten jurors only liked one song, that song get nine points. This confusing structure meant that, in 1964, the maximum number of points any song could get was supposed to be 75, but it could be 90, or it could be 135. The old system was brought back in 1968.


A major problem of this system was that, because one country could get a huge share of one jury's votes and few votes elsewhere while another could get a small number of votes from everybody, it was quite possible for a number of countries to share top spot at the end of the voting because of fragmented votes, especially in an era when fewer than twenty countries entered the Contest. The European Broadcasting Union, with the mindset of an American sports organiser, failed to think that anything like a tie could happen and had no tiebreaker should one ever happen. By fluke, there had been sole winners from 1956 (possibly, the results of that Contest have never been released) to 1968, but the EBU got its fingers badly burned in 1969, when no fewer than four of the sixteen participants tied for first place. An urban legend, but a rather brilliant one, goes that the host of that year's Contest, Laurita Valenzuela, asked the EBU's vote scrutineer, Clifford Brown, what would happen in the event of a tie. Brown replied that such a thing had never happened before, and never would. Oops. 

Just asking for karma to bite back

Despite the farce created by the voting structure, it was retained for the 1970 Contest, but at least a tie-breaker had been devised, where any joint leaders had to perform their song again, with the neutral juries voting for a favourite on a show of hands. The system finally bit the dust after this Contest, with a little help from Belgium, whose jury ensured Ireland's first victory by giving Dana nine of their ten votes.

It's unknown if the Eurovision inspired
 the camera staff on University Challenge 

The EBU managed to devise a different voting system in time for the 1971 Contest, which saw each country send two jurors to the Contest, voting for each song immediately after it had been sung, before appearing on screen at the end of the singing to verify their scores. One of the two jurors from each country was aged between 16 and 25, and the other was aged over 25, with at least ten years age difference between them. The jurors were supposed to give a score from one to five to each song, but a major flaw quickly became apparent. The freedom to give any score they liked meant some juries were very stingy with their results, possibly with the intention of improving their own country's likelihood of success. In 1971, the highest score awarded to any song by the Luxembourg jury was five points (out of a possible ten), while Malta gave no higher than a six in 1972. To be fair, there's probably little evidence that any jury actively sought to sabotage the voting in favour of their own delegation, because each contest saw a raft of generous nines and tens from the adjudicators. 

While the 1971 and 1972 Contests were uncontroversial, with clear winners, the 1973 edition showed the inefficiency of the voting method, with the thirty-four jurors (from seventeen participating countries) deciding a very tight Contest, with six points between the top three countries (Luxembourg, Spain and the United Kingdom). Matters weren't helped by one of the Swiss jurors, who decided to become a star of the show by saluting the audience while displaying his results (from 8:00 of this video), especially if they were good scores, to the disbelief of the Yugoslavian judge next to him. With so few people deciding such a close Contest, it was decided that a new voting system was required. The ten jurors with one vote each got a final encore in 1974, before it was replaced by the system which has been retained to the present day.