Voting Structure
Each country had a televote, where the top ten most voted-for songs were awarded the 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 points, with the exceptions of Turkey, Lithuania, Ireland and Bosnia & Herzegovina who used juries.
After some thoroughly confusing thrills and spills in the early voting, with Lithuania awarding maximum points to the — for once — rank outsiders Ireland, the contest soon settled into a nip-and-tuck duel between Sweden and Iceland, but with Iceland more often than not holding a slight lead. The fortunes of Germany were more erratic - on a few occasions, their challenge seemed to be failing, only for a couple of high scores to haul them back to within striking distance of the leading pair. That appeared to be the case once again when the penultimate voting country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, handed ten points to the Germans. This momentarily distracted attention from the fact that the Balkan nation had not yet awarded any points to Sweden or Iceland, meaning that one of the two was bound to receive nothing. With Charlotte Nilsson of Sweden already having crept into a three-point lead at a crucial moment, the realisation quickly dawned that, while twelve points for Iceland would put them back into a commanding position, twelve points for Sweden would settle the contest in abrupt fashion.
Read more about this topic: Eurovision Song Contest 1999
Famous quotes containing the words voting and/or structure:
“Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in its totality, in its structure: posterity discovers it in the stones with which he built and with which other structures are subsequently built that are frequently better—and so, in the fact that that structure can be demolished and yet still possess value as material.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)