50SS 2018 Semifinal Voting is CLOSED!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Semifinal voting round! In case you didn't see the header, the polls have been closed and we are now gathering the results. We had a decent turn out of ~45 voters.

VOTING

As a reminder, we have to shrink 50 songs down to 24 - the 12 songs that get the most votes from each semifinal will advance. Those 24 songs, along with California's entry, will participate in the Final Round, which is slated to begin in late June through early July. We're on track to finish everything by the same time as last year: end of July.

JURY vs. PUBLIC

The "Jury" voting style is what you've come accustomed to if you've followed us for a while, or if you're familiar with the Eurovision points system. For the first time, however, we used a second "Public" voting style that was friendlier to non-Eurovision voters. About 65% of our votes came from this system.

Public voters rated songs in groups of five at a time, ranking them from 'most favorite' (5) to 'least favorite' (1). The five songs that get a '5' will receive 5 points, songs ranked at '4' get 3 points, and songs ranked at '3' get 1 point. At the end, the total number of points will be accumulated and evened out such that Public will only account for 50% of the overall score.

We will be announcing the twelve qualifiers from each semifinal shortly. For visibility's sake, we will release the scores of the thirteen non-qualifiers. It's going to be complex for us to calculate, but it's been successful in getting more people to vote, so we will proceed with this voting style in future years.

FINAL ROUND

After the Semifinal Results are posted, please give the 50SS a few days' time to prepare the Final Round materials. Within the next 7-10 days, we should be ready to proceed to the Final Round, and the voting forms will open once again. Let's break our voting record and get 50 voters for the first time! Think we can do it?

The California entry will be announced and posted shortly after the Semifinals Results are published in its own blog post.

Thank you once again for your participation! Hopefully your favorite song (or U.S. state) makes it through.

-GL