esctoday.com, Netherlands
Dec 9 2007

Statistics
JESC 2007: voting analysis

Tonight, the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2007 took place in
Rotterdam, Netherlands and saw Belarus winning for the second time
with Alexey Zhigalkovich and his song S druzyami. As always, we offer
the real Song Contest freaks a close look on the statistics.
Please note: in all statistics concerning points given and received,
the 12 points every country scored automatically are not included.

Quickies

For the first time, a country managed to win the contest twice
For the first time, Greece finished last
For the third year running, the winning song was performed last
With the winner being only one point ahead of the runner-up, it was
the closest voting ever

Voting statistics

Belarus has received points from all countries but Cyprus, all the
other countries gave at least four points and four times the twelve
points. The runner-ups from Armenia were obviously polarizing: they
received seven times the douze, twice the ten, once eight, seven and
five – and four times not a single vote. Although with 17 countries
competing it is very likely that a country receives points from all
countries (since every country has to give points to ten out of 16
other countries), only Russia and Serbia managed to do so – they
finished third and sixth respectively.

Records

Belarus has scored an average of 8.56 points – the lowest average
score of a winner ever. On the other hand, Armenia has scored the
second highest average of points of a runner-up with 8.50. Apart from
the first contest in 2003, Armenia is also the most succesful
debuting country ever reaching second place. The other debutants
Georgia and Bulgaria also did quite well finishing fourth and seventh
respectively while Lithuania finished only 13th. Countries that have
achieved their best results so far are Serbia and F.Y.R. Macedonia
while Greece, Portugal and Belgium have reached their worst placings
so far.

The running order

For the third year in a row, the country that performed last finished
first. Last year, the songs that reached the top 3 were all performed
in the second half, this year it is less obvious that songs performed
late do better: the Armanian entry was performed third and finished
second, the Serbian entry that came third was number nine of the
evening and the fourth placed song from Gerogia has even opened the
show. On the other hand, the songs performed at number 14, 15 and 16
did not reach the top 10 with Greece coming last. Of course, the
question comes up if the new voting system, which means that you can
vote right after the show begins, does affect the results after all.
But there is one thing that will probably never change: the song
performed second did not do well at all: Belgium finished third from
last.

Diaspora voting

That’s a sensitive subject. First of all it has to be pointed out
that giving points to a neighbouring country does not necessarily
mean that there are "political" reasons – the televoters may have
also just thought that the song they have voted for was the best one!
Nevertheless, there were some friendly neighbours as always: Belgium
has received its only points from the Netherlands, Greece has
received its only points from Cyprus (even if only two this year).
Georgia and Armenia have exchanged their twelve points while the
Netherlands have recieved their highest mark from Belgium, Russia
from Belarus, F.Y.R. Macedonia from Bulgaria and Serbia and Cyprus
from Greece. Nevertheless, there are other examples that don’t prove
diaspora voting: Malta gave its 4 – 12 points to Eastern countries,
Sweden its top 4 marks. Furthermore, Sweden managed to reach the
first half of the scoreboard the second year in a row without any
other Scandinavian country taking part.

Belarus has scored an average of 6.72 points per non-former USSR
country. If the other five countries had given Belarus the same
average amount of points, Belarus would have probably not won the
competition (it has to be taken into consideration that the "missing"
points would have been given to other countries!). Nevertheless, with
six former USSR countries taking part, this statistic is rather
inaccurate: mathematically, it is very unlikely to be able to expect
these countries give to the same average amount of points than the
others.