Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.
> Decentralize the vote to the public and you destroy the risk of collusion. This is endemic in centralized systems.
In the past, when one person or committee per country voted, only the UK and Germany voted disproportionally for each other. After the switch to public voting, lots of countries now vote for their neighbours. Clearly, the general public is less cosmopolitan than that committee, and tends to vote for countries they know or feel related to, or understand the music or cultural references from.
Please note that while from 1998 to 2008 (the peak years of this contest popularity-wise imo) almost 100% of the vote was coming from the audience (via paid SMS and calls). From 2009 to 2012 audience only accounted for 50% of the votes, the rest was picked by the Eurovision company. From 2012 on, the audience had no real effect on the votes. This is also when things started getting seriously political (Conchita, Ukraine, Russia etc).
It's interesting because I just noticed that the Eurovision followed the same path as most social media during the same timeframe. Trying to make you think you have a choice while you don't, trying to fake popularity as a means of enforcing some agenda etc.
There are some small exceptions, such as in San Marino, where their small population (~32,000) and sharing of phone infrastructure with Italy makes it difficult to calculate a valid independent televote. And televotes can sometimes be ruled invalid by the auditor (PwC) if their auditing suggests it has been manipulated.
https://eurovoix.com/2017/03/08/san-marino-ebu-rejects-broad...
https://eurovision.tv/story/full-voting-results-revealed-by-...
What could go wrong?
Of course there's people who can try buying SIM cards & running bots, but in theory that's what the PwC vote auditing and Digame's systems are meant to detect & block.
It’s a game, it’s a show. Technically, so are politics, but so far Eurovision has not cost any human lives, nor have pensions evaporated. To my knowledge.
Then again, judging by the reaction of some people, that might change soon :)
During the 1990s, Ireland won so much that at some point they were hoping to lose, because they couldn't afford to win again.
But win a real election and you get to set laws and make decisions worth billions of dollars, and influence the lives of millions of people. They couldn't be more different.