How Azerbaijan Won

There has been a lot of discussion lately about how Azerbaijan won the recent Eurovision Song Contest. It seems that the general opinion was that it was a bland, forgettable song. So who voted for it? Actually, not all that many people.

Eurovision voting rules are a perfect example of one of the problems of first-pass-the-post voting. It makes it possible that a minority choice ends up winning. In the Eurovision Final there are 25 choices. This theoretically makes it possible that an entry could win the coveted 12 points with just over 4% of the overall vote.

Eurovision's scoring system also distorts the results. The winning song in a country could receive 20% of the vote while the second place song got 10%. Even though the second place song got half as many votes, it will receive 10 points while the winning song got 12. This makes the contest more competitive by handicapping the best performers. Now consider that Azerbaijan averaged 6th place and its easy to see that they could have received a lot of points while not actually receiving all that many votes.

Statistics on ESC Chat reveal more. Azerbaijan won with smallest amount of possible votes of any winning act under the current voting system, which has been in place since 1975. Overall, Azerbaijan won only 9% of the points assigned while back in 2009 Norway won with a landslide of 16%. That might not seem like a big difference, but the thing to consider is that Norway won first place in 16 countries while Azerbaijan only won in 3. Since the scoring system effectively handicaps entries that do really well by limiting the number of points it can get to a maximum of 12, Norway likely did much better its 16% would imply while Azerbaijan did worse than its 9% implies.

What does this all mean? When there isn't a clear favorite like in 2009 and 2010, the winner of Eurovision is really just a matter of chance. A relatively small number of votes can drastically change the outcome. It will be interesting to see the separated jury and televote scores once they become available as it's completely possible that Azerbaijan could have won the combined scores without actually winning the jury vote or the televote.