Tonight: Juries decide on 50% of first Semi-Final vote

13 May 2019 at 17:30 CEST

First Semi-Final opening 2019 Thomas Hanses

The heat is on, as tonight, professional judges from all countries participating in the first Semi-Final, Spain, France and Israel will cast their vote ahead of tomorrow's live show. Their vote will determine half of the outcome of Tuesday's live show. The other half will be decided by you. Combining the results will determine which ten acts will proceed to Saturday's Grand Final.

Earlier today, a full run-through of the first Semi-Final took place at the Expo Tel Aviv, open to accredited press.

Tonight, the 17 countries competing in the first Semi-Final of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest will take to the stage for the second of three Dress Rehearsals, which doubles as Jury Show. Along with judges from Spain, France and Israel, they will vote on the performances by ranking each song in their order of preference.

Judges will watch the show via an internal broadcast over the Eurovision Network. They cannot vote for the country they represent.

May we have your votes please?

Each country's public broadcaster appointed 5 jury members — music industry professionals — to cast their vote. Their rankings will be combined per country, where the song that is most popular receives 12 points, the next one receives 10 points, then 8, 7 and so on, all the way to 1 point for their 10th most favourite song.

To ensure maximum suspense, their individual rankings will be published on Eurovision.tv shortly after the Grand Final. Judges are not allowed to reveal their vote ahead of the Grand Final.

From 17 to 10

As tomorrow's first Semi-Final will only see 10 acts qualify for Saturday's final, the Eurovision dream ends for 7 of them. For that reason, all contestants will be more than determined to give their all in tonight's Jury Show.

The juries decide their points based on 4 key elements:

Vocal capacity of the singer;
Performance on stage;
Composition and originality of the song;
Overall impression of the act.

Your vote

Your vote tomorrow will provide the remaining 50% of the points.

After the voting lines have closed, Digame, the EBU's official voting partner of the Eurovision Song Contest, will aggregate the jury and televoting data. Under the supervision of the EBU and EY notaries, the scores are then verified and tomorrow night, the 10 countries that have qualified for the Grand Final will be announced.