Quite a lot of people enjoy the Eurovision song contest. It is as good as watching the counting of votes in a general election.
Once again, the voting process in last year’s contest descended into geographical farce, mainly because of the similarities between cultures in adjoining countries. Naturally, most of them swapped high points with each other. This practice needs radical reform.
A solution might be to invent “distance-weighted voting” or “voting proportional to distance”. To put that simply, multiply the votes by factors proportional to the relative distances of other entrants from the voting country.
That would dilute the voting power of cultural clusters, but it would give undue influence to the continental periphery. The simplest compromise might be to double all votes given to non-neighbouring countries.
Is it possible to devise a better voting system? Would a perfect system award the trophy to the most mediocre song, to offend as few people as possible but end up pleasing nobody?