[EM] Interesting use of Borda count

[Jurij Toplak]

There are about 25-30 nominees. That makes it more like hybrid of Approval
and Borda voting. You mentioned strategic voting - there is a large
possibility of strategic voting since countries do not give the votes at the
same time. They call to the TV show one by one and give their votes. So for
example, when the last country votes, they know the present results of all
the other countries. And this goes on very slowly (voting lasts for about an
hour) so there is even easier to adjust the votes. And there are also
emotions involved  - countries tend to vote for their friend-countries. For
example when there was the last "primary" voting for the candidate song in
old Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia were voting for one group of
candidates and Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia for the other.

----- Original Message -----
From: Bart Ingles <bartman at netgate.net>



>
> For clarification, are there exactly 11 or 12 nominees?  Or is there a
> much larger pool of candidates, from which each country is free to
> select its top 11 choices?
>
> If the former, the system sounds very close to Borda.  I don't think the
> lack of an 11 point tier makes much difference.  If the latter, then
> it's more of an Approval-Borda hybrid, since there would be a number of
> candidates receiving 0 points from a given country -- the more
> candidates in excess of 11, the more it approaches Approval Voting.
>
> A Borda-like method might actually be suitable here, since the
> complicated process in each country to choose its list of candidates
> would make strategic ranking all but impossible, and public pressure to
> get as many songs as possible listed would prevent truncation.  Also,
> the nature of the contest (song choices) may be especially amenable to
> ranking (vs. cardinal rating or approval/disapproval) -- in effect
> spreading out the distinctions between closely competitive candidates in
> order to make the contest more interesting (this is supposed to be
> entertainment, after all).
>
> I think the hybrid method shares in these advantages as well, but saves
> individual countries from having to rank potentially dozens of nominees,
> and allows flexibility over how many points to assign to each of the top
> 11 choices.  Pure Borda may not have been practical here.
>
> Bart Ingles
>
>
> Olli Salmi wrote:
> >
> > I'm not sure if this is very interesting. This year's Eurovision Song
> > Contest is approaching. The winner is elected by a kind of Borda count.
> > Each participating country has 11 votes. They give 12 points to the song
> > they think is best, and from ten to one for the next ones. The points of
> > course are given from the bottom up to make the procedure more
> > entertaining. Does the lack of 11 make any great difference?
> >
> > The contest arouses great passions. Sweden is using a six tier series of
> > contests to choose their entry. The Finnish final is tonight.
> >
> > Olli Salmi
>