Custom dot-product metric scored jury voting accuracy (2016-2025); Spain leads at 0.815 but top seven are within 0.025 of each other.
Key Takeaways
Metric: multiply voter’s awarded points by country’s final points, sum, divide by theoretical perfect score; result sits naturally 0-to-1.
Spain (0.815), Lithuania (0.810), Belgium (0.804) top the table; Montenegro (0.625) is last across 40 countries.
Top seven countries span only 0.025, narrower than any single country’s year-to-year variance, so no clear single winner.
Analysis covers jury votes only from 2016 onward, when Eurovision split jury and televote into separate slates.
Bloc-voting suspects (Croatia, North Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro) cluster near the bottom, but Cyprus, Albania, Serbia rank mid-table, so the metric measures accuracy, not bloc behavior.
Hacker News Comment Review
Discussion is dominated by geopolitical objections rather than methodology critique: commenters challenged Israel’s Eurovision eligibility and raised allegations of coordinated bot campaigns rather than engaging with the ranking math.
One commenter noted Spain boycotted 2025, which may affect the accuracy scores by filtering toward more attentive jury voters, a confound the article does not address.
No commenter engaged with metric alternatives (NDCG@10, Pearson, least-squares) or the GitHub data validation against Wikipedia tables.
Notable Comments
@timpera: Flags Spain’s 2025 boycott as a potential confound for its top accuracy score.
