Split Votes: A Step In The Right Direction

I have been rather interested in the online debate which has emerged about the split results.

In contrast to many other years I have been surprised by the amount of acceptance that there has been of the results. Many other years have seen many fans call for an end to juries in the contest and a return to televoting.

Many websites have been shocked at the EBU only releasing the split averages of scores rather than using the old system. However I ask - did the old way of giving results really give you that much insight into how Europe voted?

I think that we as fans are inclined to over-obsess on the results. It is only a natural thing that would of course come from PED. Some people may try to reverse engineer the results to understand some of the results. But really when you think about it, what good is it to go back through individual results?

The EBU and PWC work together to ensure that there is no cheating at jury or televote level. While some of the voting patterns in the contest in the past five years do concern me I do think that these people are as concerned about the contest as we are and will spot irregularities in the voting patterns as they arise.

So really what good does it do us to know split results. Over on ESCInsight they have had some interesting debate and have suggested that we do not need to know the split results if all the EBU will give us is averages. However I don't use the split result to try to go back over the contest and where Denmark or any other country won and lost their votes. I use split results to better understand what songs worked with the public and what worked for the juries. This helps me to better understand the contest in the future, but does not let me focus on the past.

Of course it goes without saying that full details of the results should be released to clearly show how the voting worked and the EBU should do this.