Eurovision 2019: the semi-finals with the old systems

This Sunday, we published the results of the 2019 grand final with the old voting system. Now, we give you the results of the semi-finals : will the qualifiers change?

Once again, we have used the 2009-2012 system, in which the common top 10 is determined by adding the points from a country’s televote and from his jury. However, jury votes were re-calculated with the method used in 2009 (and up to 2017). This also allow us to calculate the full jury scores, and thus to simulate the voting as it would have been with the system used in 2016 and 2017. With a very small difference between last qualifier and first non-qualifier in each semi, the slightest changes in the jury votes could be enough to change the situation.

First Semi-Final

First, let’s discover the results with the 2009 system :

As you can see, the main difference is that, with the old system, Poland would qualify over Belarus. Hardly a surprise when only two points separated them in the current system. And while Finland is still last, they only get points from one contry : 8 points from Estonia.

As for the results from the old jury, they would not actually change the qualifiers, as you can see below. Indeed, the gap between Belarus and Poland would actually be widened by the old jury

Results with televote

Second Semi-Final

Once again, let’s first focus on the results with the 2009 system!

Once again, the qualifiers would be different! And not only would Lithuania, the country that came 11th in the actual results (and 1 point away from the 10th), qualify, but Denmark (who actually came 10th) would slip down to the 12th place, behind Romania.

The tie between Sweden and North Macedonia for the second place was broken with the tie-breaking rule of giving precedence to the country who got points from the most countries : every country gave points to North Macedonia while Russia, Moldova and Italy did not give any points to Sweden.

As for the results with the old jury only, they do change the qualifiers, and also have Denmark as 12th. Indeed, this time, the old jury wouldn’t have widened the gap, or at least they would have, but after inverting it (Denmark losing 10 jury points).

Results with the televote:

NOTE: As you may know, at least two jurors this year input their ranking in the wrong order during the semi-finals (Lina Hedlund from Sweden and Jitka Zelenkova from the Czech Republic), putting their last place in first place, their second-to-last in 2nd place, etc. When calculating the results above, we did not put their rankings “in the right order” : indeed, the official results have never been changed after a juror discovered their mistake, and our goal is to show the alternate official results as they would have appeared 10 years or 2 years ago.

What do you think of these alternate scores? In this situation, whic system do you prefer? And which one do you think is the fairest? Tell us more in the comments below, or on social media at @escxtra !