Believe it or not, Christmas is less than five months away. Doesn’t time fly? Nevertheless, it also means that the 2018 Junior Eurovision Song Contest is less than four months away! With the EBU recently announcing that nineteen countries will participate in Minsk, a record-breaking number for the contest, just how will this year’s winner be determined?
Don’t fix what isn’t broke!
Over at fellow Eurovision website ESCBubble.com, they asked the EBU for a statement on how the voting would work for this year’s Junior Eurovision Song Contest. The EBU responded as follows:
The voting mechanism remains the same as last year.
So there we go, it will be the same system as used last year! Let’s remind ourselves of what happened…
Online voting and a jury vote
Last year, the voting system consisted of an online audience vote and a national jury from each participating nation. Each jury contained three music industry professionals and two children aged between 10 and 15 from the country they were representing. The online vote and jury vote were weighted equally at 50% each.
The online vote took part in two phases. Two days before the final, the first phase of the online vote opened. Here, the public had to watch a recap video combining clips from each country’s rehearsal. If desired, voters could also watch one minute rehearsal clips of each nation too. Once the decision was made, each person could select between three and five entries to vote for… and you could even vote for your own country!
The second phase of the vote took part during the live show for fifteen minutes after the conclusion of the final performance. Nevertheless, there were widespread reports of this phase of the vote crashing during the final in Tbilisi. Hopefully, this will be sorted for 2018!
Presenting the votes
During the show, each national jury gave out the classic 1-12 points to their favourite 10 songs. Then, the online voting points were divided up between each song depending on the percentage of votes each song received throughout both voting phases. Why not rewatch the 2017 voting results below?
Exciting, right? Two very different sets of results led to an extremely tense voting reveal! Maybe we’ll get another tense results reveal in Minsk?
Are you pleased that the 2017 Junior Eurovision voting system is remaining for another year? Do you think it could be improved in any way? Let us know in the comments!
Hi there, I think the 2017 / 2018 online voiting system is very good (as long as the server can handle this huge traffic) – last year they went down during the 15 min. voting time in the show, because there was too much traffic. The very good thing is, that everybody worldwide has the chance to vote for 3-5 acts …..that make the JESC way more interesting.
As long as 2019 isn\’t the last one. I\’m seriously hoping for countries that haven\’t hosted JESC yet to submit bids for hosting JESC 2020.
Данэлия Тулешова