JESC’14: The Voting Explained

Voting at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest has gone through a number of changes in recent years, so to help you out on Saturday night and explain the differences to the adult contest we’ve got a quick overview of its history and how it will work on Saturday night.

12 Points

12 points are given to every country before the results are even announced. This rule was implemented in 2005 to ensure that no country ends the night with 0 points. In the 2003 and 2004 contest 6 songs failed to make it out of single digits. Furthermore the 12 points is supposed to help ease the pressure on the performers, knowing that no matter what they have done well.

Kids Jury

Since 2012 a Kid’s Jury has existed at Junior Eurovision. The jury is made up of 1 former Junior Eurovision participant or singer between the age of 10-15 from each country. They rate the songs and rank the songs 1-10. These scores are put together to given an overall vote.

Online Voting

New for this year is the process of online voting. Viewers outside of the 16 participating countries watching the JuniorEurovision.tv stream will be able to vote for one song to be given the “Online Award”. The winner of the “Online Award” will be presented the award in the press conference after the show.

Jury

As with Eurovision, the vote of each country is made up of 50% jury vote. On each jury are 5 music professionals who will rank the performances in the dress rehearsal from their favourite to their 10th favourite. The names of the jurors from each country will be named on Saturday morning.

The Spokespersons

As with 2013 the Spokespersons will be live on the stage in the venue. In all of the contests before 2013 each country would announce their points via a satellite link. The reason that the spokespersons are on stage is to lower the costs of participating, it is far cheaper for a delegation to bring 1 person out to Malta for 3 days than it is to pay for the Satellite time.

How the points are announced

With this years contest seeing a total of 16 countries taking part the way that the points are announced on the night have changed. The points in 2013 were announced individually due to just 12 countries taking part in Kiev. Instead on Saturday they will be announced in the following way:

• Points 1-7 will be showed on screen
• Points 8,10 & 12 will then be read out by the Spokesperson

We hope that you enjoy the show thoroughly on Saturday night.