So, back in May, the Eurovision organisers commented on the voting complaints for the 2012 contest, last week Bonnie Tyler apparently overheard Russian's asking where their paid for points were. This week, the Eurovision rules have been tightened to hopefully provide more tightness and openness with the jury votes.

Under the new rules, the names of all jury members will be announced on the 1st of May, before the contest. Additionally, EBU/EUROVISION will publish the ranking submitted by each individual jury member for all shows right after the Final, and thus the split results of jury voting and televoting for each country. To increase diversity, music industry professionals can only take a seat in a national jury if they have not been in the jury during one of the previous two editions of the contest.

To me this sounds like an excellent plan. I've always thought that the jury voting in Eurovision was open to abuse. Nobody seems to know who the jury are or what points they gave which country. I have found a blog post from the BBC today, published in June 2013, which does list our Jury's decisions - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/eurovision/posts/Results-of-the-UK-Jury-2013 - apparently they voted for Russia, are the UK Jury being bought too? I can't believe that they voted for such a hypocritical song!

"Tighter rules and increased openness are important for the Eurovision Song Contest to build on its success," Jon Ola Sand, the Executive Supervisor of the contest on behalf of EBU/EUROVISION, adding: "to make sure participants, viewers and fans know that we have done and will always do our utmost to secure a fair result. These changes show that the Eurovision Song Contest is an ever evolving tradition, which continues to adapt to the spirit of time."

All well and good I say, but why hasn't this been done before? There has always been "neighbour voting" - For example, Greece votes for Cyprus and vice versa every year. Since the introduction of the "Eastern Bloc" countries into the contest, they all generally seem to vote for each other too. But this is nothing new, it's always been done and will probably continue. All well and good you might say, but what can be done? Probably not a lot. Each year we all complain about voting like this, but little can be done without major rule changes that would never be agreed to and would probably kill the contest. For example, each year I say that if you have a direct border with a country, then you shouldn't be able to vote for it. To me, this is an excellent idea, but it would never work. 

Hopefully these rule changes will go some way to clarifying the votes received, and I look forward to seeing who the judges are, especially for our country!

What do you think of these changes? Please, comment below.