how do we solve a problem like marija?

An EDU essay on Eastern Europe's voting collusion More than ever before, the Eurovision Song Contest of 2007 has been slammed by fans worldwide as being little more than the Warsaw Pact Song Contest. Eastern European nations dominated both semi-finals and grand-final to the exclusion of all nations west of the Oder (as illustrated perfectly by the following graphic which appeared on wikipedia soon after the final)

Reaction
The reaction to Eastern Europe's self-service was immediate and uniform, west of the Oder. Germany's 'Bild Zeitung' bluntly asked "Why are we even taking part any more?", slamming the "shameful exchange of points." Switzerland's 'Blick' offered, "none of the countries of Western and Northern Europe have a chance."
Monaco refused to compete in Eurovision this year (what, you didn't notice they were gone?!) due to poor results which they blamed on Eastern bloc voting. It would appear the floodgates are about to open. Israel's IBA has withdrawn from 2008's contest and Israel will not likely return before 2010 if ever. Ireland - the seven-time winner of ESC - is reviewing their involvement. 'The Irish Examiner' reported the broadcaster as saying: "We will definitely be having a sit-down and looking at our geographical position and going through the whole process."
The Times of Malta highlighted their frustrations, but also the token effort a boycott would be. "[T]here are those who are coming up with all sorts of interpretations and suggestions following Malta's failure this year. They include proposals not to participate anymore, not ever. Or stay away next year as a sign that we want the voting rules to be changed...One can believe that by boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest, Malta can be a mover and a shaker. Or, that her gestures will cause smiles without begetting meaningful action." They also recognised that Olivia Lewis didn't beat Fabrizio Fanbiello in the 2006 National Finals and he got a whole 1 point at ESC '06 - so Olivia's failure in '07 was probably not purely the result of bloc voting.

The Problem(s)
Neighbourhood Watch spotted the following suspicious patterns in 2007.

• 32 of the 51 points Sweden received came from their neighbours (including 12s from Denmark and Norway). The Finns seem to be rejecting this bloc - sending 12 and 10 to Serbia and Hungary respectively and getting less than 40% of their points from locals.
• Yugoslavia may not have stuck together as a nation, but they stick together for Eurovision voting. All five former Yugoslav nations gave their douze to Serbia! Macedonia picked up nearly 2/3rd of its points from Yugoslav nations and Slovenia (50%).
• One-third of all competitors in ESC 07 were formerly USSR nations and they share the love. Almost all high marks from a former-USSR nation went to another former USSR nation. Russia got 12 points from Armenia, Belarus and Estonia. Latvia got ten points from Estonia and Lithuania, and, Georgia got it's only douze from Lithuania.

But one year alone cannot make a pattern. Thankfully, voting patterns have been tracked by a number of statisticians over the years and several academic papers have been produced on the subject. For example:

• Derek Gatherer, "Comparison of Eurovision Song Contest Simulation with Actual Results Reveals Shifting Patterns of Collusive Voting Alliances", Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 9, no. 2 (2006)
• Victor Ginsburgh & Abdul Noury, "Cultural Voting: The Eurovision Song Contest", ECARES, Universit´e Libre de Bruxelles (2004)

and many others, including your very own EDU!
Collusion in voting can be defined as a pattern of votes given by two nations to one another which exceeds the average votes those nations received from all other nations in the Contest. The threshold for marking votes as suspicious was historically quite low and gave rise to such groups prior to 1989 as the Maltese Cross (Luxembourg, Croatia and Malta) and Axis of Britain (UK, Monaco and Switzerland) - see below graphic. Only the Scandanavian bloc seemed large enough to alter the results of the Contest. Gatherer's statistical analysis from 2001-2005 illustrated the dramatic shift in bloc voting with the introduction of Eastern European nations.
 
One paper from 2004 that we read suggested that the introduction of the semi-finals would put an end to neighbourhood collusion! The very opposite is the case.

The 2007 Blocs - as mapped by EDU
By establishing the average points a nation got in either a semi or grand-final from 2004-2007 and comparing that figure with the votes they received from their neighbours, we were able to set thresholds as high as double and even triple the average score! Never before has the quality of the song counted for so little - and the address of the artist counted for so much.

HR = Croatia YU = Serbia (Montenegro is included in Serbia's results for 2004-06) SL = Slovenia BH = Bosnia-Herzegovina MK = FY Macedonia AL = Albania TR = Turkey GR = Greece CY = Cyprus (Note: Turkey receives votes well above the threshold from most of Western Europe but does not reciprocate). BY = Belarus RU = Russia AR = Armenia UA = Ukraine PL = Poland (Note: Belarus is giving votes to UA and PL, but not receiving them back)

The big changes in the blocs from 2001 to 2007 would appear to be the creation of a new dyad (Romania and Moldova) which has removed Romania from the Balkan and Warsaw blocs (votes do flow from most of the Warsaw Pact to Moldova, so they may join). Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina are now more heavily involved with the former Yugoslav bloc, whilst Macedonia has drifted from the centre of this group into a position adjacent to Albania and (surprisingly) Slovenia. The Warsaw Pact bloc has expanded, with Armenia and Russia reciprocating in their short histories together - whilst Belarus gets above-threshold votes from Russia but supplies above-threshold votes to Poland, Ukraine and Russia. Lithuania and Latvia supply votes to Russia also.

ESC as a Senate
While neighbours voting for one another should be as surprising as death and taxes, the major problem with what is currently happening in Eurovision is that the number of nations in Eastern Europe is now much greater than it used to be, or the corresponding regions elsewhere in Europe. All these mini-states like Montenegro and Moldova have equal representation in voting rights as nations like the Big Four with populations one or two orders of magnitude greater. Whereas Yugoslavia may have sent 12 points to a song it liked in 1990, in 2007 the six former yugoslav republics can now potentially send 72 points to a song they like.
In a similar fashion, the former USSR/CIS nations can now deliver 108 points if they choose the same benefactor.
Now, its wonderful to have 40+ nations sending songs. Georgia, Moldova and Armenia have all been brilliant on debut and add quite a lot to the contest. But it is fundamentally unfair to have a nation of 620,000 (Montenegro) delivering the same impact (in terms of douze point) as a nation of 83,000,000 (Germany).
The best analogy to this system is the Senate in Australia (or the USA) which exists to give equal representation in the Upper House of Parliament/Congress for small states and large states alike.
And that's the problem of Eurovision in 2007 in a nutshell: it is all Senate, and no House of Representatives.

The Options
So, we know the problem and we know the source(s) - now we need some solutions. So what are the options?
Option 1: Weighting
What Eurovision needs is a way of representing the raw, popular votes across the EBU, with some proportional division over territory.
There are about 740 million people in the 42 nations competing in Eurovision in 2007. There are a total of 2,352 points to be awarded (42 x 56 pts). A simple weighting system would be that 314,000 people in your nation equals one ESC vote point. The extreme examples of this weighting system would be Russia - whose 1 point would count for 6 points and their douze would deliver 72 points. Andorra on the other hand, would deliver a total of 1/5 of one point - their douze would constitute barely 1/20th of a point.
Clearly Russia would have a monumental say in who won each year - and 'Eastern Europe' would still deliver 44% of the points. We can't see Andorra or Monaco going for this plan in a big way either!

Option 2: Oh, You're Two Contests
Falling into the 'taking our ball home' category is the most plausible revision - two separate contests. Toine Manders, a Dutch member of the European parliament, has suggested a new show comprising only the member states of the European Union using their official language (basically Eurovision pre-expansion). He is lobbying the EU parliament for funding and says several media companies are interested. Manders suggests a split between televotes and a jury vote would avoid neighbourhood/bloc voting.
The 2 contests idea has some popular support - Tim Moore (author of Nul Points) was quoted in the British press saying, "maybe there should be two separate Eurovisions, which are screened in the west and the east, with a sing-off for the top finishers in each one at a united competition."
Keep in mind that from 2009 the EBU will be having two semi-finals before the Grand Final. The EBU has stated the participants in the Semis will be drawn at random, but that was before Israel withdrew and Ireland said it would review its participation (and it's before whatever outrage takes place in May 2008). There is a very strong chance that a Western European semi will exist shortly - which may become the de-facto schlager festival for us dags. The Eastern Europeans will have their Zeljko impersonation contest and the winners from the two contests will go head-to-head in a final that only Eastern Europe will care about.

Option 3: Sub-regional super-votes
This option is a bit aikido - using the problem against itself. If nations are want to vote in blocs, then recognise that and gerrymander the effect. The United Nations defines Europe as consisting of the following sub-regions:

• Northern: Ireland, UK, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
• Southern: Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, FY Macedonia, Greece, Malta, Turkey
• Western: France, Monaco, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria
• Eastern: Czech, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary.
• Nations not included in the definitions are: Cyprus, Israel, Georgia, Armenia

Option 3 is that each of the five sub-regions pool their votes from each nation in their sub-region and deliver a 'super-vote' of 50 points (or more!) to the top-ranking nation from outside their own bloc.
So, Cyprus, Israel, Georgia and Armenia would announce their votes as currently done, then at the conclusion they'd say the most popular song from a nation outside of their sub-region was Belarus (which it was in both Semi and Grand Final).
This forces even the most pronounced back-scratching nations to send a large numbers of points outside their zone of influence.
These super-votes would make a nice break in the monotony of the voting process. Run through all the nations in a sub-region favouring one another and then conclude with a huge vote going to an outsider! Repeat that for the two largest sub-regions, have an intermission, then repeat for the smaller three sub-regions.
NOTE: Applying 'super-votes' to the 2007 semi and grand finals made no difference whatsoever (Russia fell from 3rd to 5th in the Grand Final, that was it) So there would be little resistance to the idea - then membership of the sub-regions could be tweeked to pool the worst offenders together.

Option 4: Everyone Scores
The next two options come from The Arockalypse blog.
Each nation which competes gets a score from 1 to 23 (if there are 24 competitors) from all other competitors. So every nation has to score every other nation.
The highest points awarded (say 21, 23 and 25) could be announced as the 8, 10 and 12 are currently - whilst all the lower points are automatically added to board the screen as points 1 through 7 do now.
There is no way of knowing how this score would have affected previous contests, but it would certainly provide a fairer representation of the success of each competitor. It ensures that a country needs to do better across the board than get a few high points from a few countries to still do well.
NOTE: This would be the death of 'nul points' :-(

Option 5: Count the Nations
Part of the real crisis from 2007 was that Eastern Europe used its numbers to stop any Western or Northern European nation from qualifying. To make the semi-final 'bloc-proof' the qualifiers would be the countries with votes from the largest number of other countries, irrespective of their actual score.
Under this system, a nation with 97 points from 12 nations (like FYROM in the '07 semi) would fail to qualify against a nation which got 80 points from 19 nations (like Andorra did). Tie-breaks could be split by using the current points system.
If used for the 2007 semi-final Andorra and Poland would have qualified at the expense of Moldova and FYROM.
NOTE: Option 5 cannot be used in conjunction with Option 4 - Option 4 is an amendment to the Grand Final scoring and Option 5 is purely for Semis. (This option is also courtesy of The Arockalypse blog.)

Conclusion
At the end of the day, Eastern Europe (inc. Baltic and Balkans, excluding Turkey, Cyprus Israel and Greece) constitutes 20 nations with a combined population of 323 million. There is an almost even split between Eastern Europe and non-Eastern Europe in both population and number of nations competing. It may only be fair and correct to expect half of the ESC family to have a strong voice and influence the contest - to ensure they are marginalised would undermine the entire point of having the contest.
Austrian broadcaster ORF probably got it right when it stated Eurovision "is taken more seriously as a pop competition [in Eastern Europe] while in the old guard countries it is still regarded as the Schlager Grand Prix". If the West wants to win Eurovision it needs to send Morrissey not Scooch. If Finland can win Eurovision in the 21st century, then anyone can - given the right act.

"Good Ole Europe is Dying, Good Ole Europe is dead" - Alf Poier