Eurovision Voting: Boring World Test Cases

Now we have decided what contributes to suspense, we can test them by comparing them to what are hypothetically the least suspenseful votes possible in Eurovision.

Since currently I have two factors, I am coming up with a scenario that minimises each of them.

Boring World Scenario A:

The juries involved in voting are all identical sets of clones, each country thus votes exactly the same way. 12 countries get away with cheating by voting for themselves making the reveal order irrelevant. Presumably they get away with it because of mind control satellites or something.

Boring World Scenario B:

One country puts in a performance which is breathtakingly phenomenally better than all of the others, who kind of all forgot about Eurovision and ended up sending a man and his old arthritic dog who get up on stage and awkwardly warble for 30 second. As a result one country gets the maximum (432 points) possible, and every other entrant ends up with the other 25 getting the average. Given that the average is 69.56, the .56 means there should be 14 countries in 2nd place, each with 70 points.

Both of these situations would be pretty boring purely from the context of voting results. In A there is no shifting of positions, once the first results are announced there is no movement, but theoretically the result could change until right near the end. There is only a difference of 74 points between 1st and 2nd. The positions are technically only certain when the 31st set of results are out.

In Scenario B the winner is made clear as early as I think is possible within the voting rules for Eurovision, which appears to be round 21. But it should be pretty clear what the result is well before this point in both cases.

Honestly I think that scenario B is the less suspenseful of the two, but I am not sure. What do you think?

EDIT: As Krellen pointed out, I had messed up the numbers. I had been thinking in terms of a system where each country gives out 12 scores, worth 1-12 points each. In Eurovision each country gives out 10 scores,1 through 8, 10 and 12. This shifts the positions of the tipping point to be a little bit earlier.

Eurovision Voting: Suspense

Last weekend I watched the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest with my partner. It is the first time I had ever paid any attention to Eurovision and it was a pretty fun evening of spectacle. While I couldn't follow the Swedish commentary, my fiancée could and would generally relay any particularly interesting information.

One thing she mentioned when we were approaching the end of the night is that the order in which the voting results are revealed is algorithmically sorted to generate the maximum suspense. I can't help but wonder what would that algorithm look like? Seems it would be an interesting challenge to try to create my own version.

As a first step, we need to find an answer to the question: What do we mean by suspense in this context?
Without knowing the answer to this question, we don't know what we are trying to maximise and that will make it very difficult to produce an effect system.

I definitely don't know all the answers here and would like to hear your ideas, but here is what I am currently thinking. High suspense means:
- A lot of movement in rankings (especially the top position)
- If there is a clear winner, their victory is made obvious as late as possible
- If the final result is close, the second last round should show positions 1 & 2 as close as possible, ideally with the final victor being second.

In other words, you want to ensure that the audience is unsure of the victor for as long as possible, and to try to ensure that as many countries as possible are in the running and jockeying for position.

So what other factors do you think contribute to suspense?