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Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovision Song Contest 2003 - Rules. Part 5
XI. VOTING PROCEDURE: TELEVOTING AND JURY
Televoting is obligatory in each country. A back-up jury must be created to deal with the case of a technical failure (see also below for a description of the procedure). If it is necessary to ask for a back-up jury, the reason(s) must be notified in writing to the Permanent Services by a notary. Upon request, the Reference Group is authorized to make an exception to the televoting rule for a country where telecommunications penetration is less that 80%. In that case, the country shall create a jury, in accordance with the rules for a backup jury (see below).
No later than 15 minutes after the start of the voting, the last five organizations in the voting procedure shall deliver their votes to the Scrutineer off-air (by fax), in order to facilitate verification of the final result. These votes shall be announced on-air in accordance with the normal procedure.
1. Televoting procedures
Participants shall respect the following conditions:
(a) Participants which have not successfully conducted a national telepoll within the last three years must seek advice from the Permanent Services.
(b) Participants must be able to accommodate 25 different telephone numbers with the numbers ending with digits between 01 and 26 (it being understood that the total number may change, according to the final number of participants).
(c) Participants shall have a stand-by jury of eight people.
(d) Participants shall work closely with the main national telephone network operator and receive assurances from it that the televoting will not cause disruption to emergency service calls.
(e) Voters are not allowed to vote for their own country of residence. To minimize the risk of national lobby groups voting for their own song in other countries, telephone numbers must be used that cannot be dialled across frontiers (or for which international calls can be excluded from the total count). No household shall be permitted to vote more than three times.
(f) The televoting must be capable of being run and completed within five minutes.
(g) The lines provided to answer calls must be equally accessible to any of the numbers being rung.
(h) The telephone network must ensure that at least 80% of the population of the country stands an equal chance of successfully calling in.
(i) Participants must keep the results of calls made to all numbers and provide these results to the Permanent Services after the Contest Final. These results must be checked and certified by a notary.
(j) Participants must ensure that they can announce the result within a tight seven-minute time-frame, starting at the beginning of the voting. It is recommended that this element should be rehearsed before the Contest Final.
(k) Participants shall promote the benefits of the televoting system within their country through positive public relations.
(l) The start-time and cut-off time for counting the votes must be exactly the same for all numbers used in the televoting within any country. In particular, the call-counter (the logger) must be set at zero at the moment when the public is invited to start telephoning after it has heard all the songs. Any calls made before that time must be discounted.
(m) Within each country, the cost of voting or the rate at which calls are charged must be the same for all people. Use of a national premium-rate code or other non-geographic code will ensure this. It is accepted that the cost of registering a televote will vary from one country to another.
(n) Participants shall comply with the recommendation of the producing organization on how the televoting should be presented (i.e. in terms of graphics, commentators, etc.).
(o) SMS voting is allowed. The rules on SMS voting must comply with the rules on televoting.
2. Jury procedures (Stand-by Jury)
The following rules shall apply for the stand-by juries, as well as a jury in a country where telecommunications penetration is less than 80%
(a) The participant shall appoint a national jury of eight members. The names of the members of the national juries may not be disclosed until the day after the Contest Final. Four members of each national jury must be representatives of the public in the country, the other four being music professionals. There should be an equal number of men and women on each jury, with four jurors aged below 30 and four above 30 years of age. Only one of the four professional jurors may be connected with a record company or music publisher. The composition of these juries may be completely different from that of the jury or juries appointed by participants for their national selection procedures.
(b) Each member of each national jury shall award from one to ten votes to each song, excluding the song presented by the participant that has appointed him/her. Abstentions shall not be allowed.
(c) The members of the national juries shall register their votes for each song as soon as it has been sung, on secret voting papers that shall be collected by the secretary.
(d) Each jury shall have a chairperson, appointed by the relevant participant from its own staff, who shall be responsible for counting the votes after each song has been performed, and for allocating points accordingly for the Contest Final results, after the last song has been sung. He/she shall be assisted by a secretary who shall act as spokesperson and be responsible for communicating the jury’s final points, clearly and distinctly in English or in French, when requested to do so by the producing organization’s presenter.
(e) Each national jury must sit in its own country in the presence of a notary, or similar official, whose task it shall be to ensure adherence to the above rules and to collect the completed voting papers and send them to the Permanent Services in Geneva, where they shall be filed in the archives.
The official materials (SPG 02-12058) from European Broadcasting Union / Union Europeenne de Radio-Television had been used at creation of this part of the site
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