May 18, 2026
Douze Points and Dirty Looks
Which country voted the best at Eurovision?
Fans wanted voting math, but the comments turned into a Eurovision civil war
TLDR: A fan built a simple score to figure out which Eurovision country is best at predicting the final top songs. But the comments instantly exploded into accusations of vote manipulation, arguments about Israel’s place in the contest, and classic forum nitpicking over whether the math itself was wrong.
A delightfully nerdy Eurovision question — which country is actually the best at voting for the right songs — somehow sparked exactly the kind of chaos the internet lives for. The original post was simple enough: one viewer ignored the glitter and key changes, built a score to see which countries most accurately picked the eventual top 10, and tried to measure who had the sharpest musical crystal ball. In plain English, the idea was to reward countries for backing the songs that really did well, and especially for putting them in roughly the right order.
But the community? Oh, they took that polite numbers exercise and dragged it straight into Eurovision’s messiest favorite topics: politics, alleged manipulation, and whether the contest is even capable of being "fair" anymore. One commenter praised the data and casually floated the idea that fewer casual viewers this year may have changed the vibe. Others went full scorched earth, insisting the post ignored the "elephant in the room" and accusing a certain country of gaming the vote for years. Another asked, bluntly, why Israel is in Eurovision at all, even dropping a New York Times link like a receipt in a group chat.
And then, in true comment-section fashion, one person swerved hard back into spreadsheet land, arguing a correlation matrix would have been better — which is the most Eurovision-meets-forum-brain twist imaginable. So yes, the article was about voting accuracy. But the real show was the comments: part music nerd summit, part geopolitical food fight, part stats flex-off.
Key Points
- •The article asks which Eurovision country has voted most accurately by comparing national jury rankings with the eventual final top 10.
- •A simple top-10 overlap measure was rejected because it ignores ranking order within each vote allocation.
- •The author created a normalized scoring metric using Eurovision’s own point weights: 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
- •A 2023 worked example using Sweden, Israel, Italy, Finland, and Estonia produces a sample accuracy score of 0.96.
- •The analysis begins in 2016 because Eurovision then split each country’s contribution into separate jury and televote point slates.