Zvezde Granda Voting Rules: Panic Button Means Elimination

Zvezde Granda is opening its new season with a completely reworked jury voting system, and on September 20, Grand Production director Goran Sljivic and host Voja Nedeljkovic spelled out publicly, for the first time, exactly how it works. A day after the first episode aired on Prva, it became clear that the number of votes a contestant gets from the jury now decides not just whether they stay in the competition, but who their mentor will be.

Until now, viewers only knew that the season was starting on Saturday and that Ceca was joining the jury. Now there are rules for how the game is actually played.

The system runs on numbers. A contestant who gets seven or eight votes advances and chooses their own mentor. One who gets five or six votes also moves on, but the mentor is assigned by the production rather than chosen by the contestant. One to four votes sends a contestant straight into the tiebreaker. Zero votes, combined with a pressed panic button, ends the competition for that contestant.

Voja Nedeljkovic described it this way:

With five, six, seven and eight votes, you advance directly to the next round. Those who end up with zero votes and panic buttons will have to leave the competition. Those who end up with one, two, three or four votes will be in the tiebreaker.

Another new element is that a jury member now has three options instead of two. They can vote, they can choose not to vote, or they can hit the panic button, which is the harshest mark a single juror can give a contestant.

Goran Sljivic went a step further and explained why five and six votes make a difference compared with seven and eight:

Five, six, seven and eight votes gets you into the second round, and that eighth vote is the production’s vote, which we can give, but we don’t have to. When someone has five or six votes, the Production assigns mentors to the contestants. When someone has seven or eight votes, they have the right to choose their own mentor, but the jury can vote, can abstain, or can also give the panic button.

That statement reveals a detail that is easy to miss: the eighth vote isn’t a mandatory jury vote at all, it’s a vote the production adds at its own discretion. That means a score of seven votes, topped up by that extra eighth one, is effectively the highest result a contestant can get in that round.

A mechanism that didn’t exist before has also been introduced. A mentor can now say whether they want to withdraw their vote if they don’t see themselves working with a particular contestant. If a mentor pulls their vote, the contestant also loses the right to choose who they’ll work with, since the production then assigns the mentor instead, even if the contestant’s vote count would otherwise have entitled them to choose.

In practice, this rule makes the choice a two way street. A contestant no longer picks a mentor purely for themselves; the mentor also has to agree to take them through the competition.

We previously reported on the new Zvezde Granda season when Ceca’s return to the jury and the Saturday premiere on Prva were first announced. This explanation of the rules marks the first time the production has gone into the details of the actual scoring system, rather than just announcing the schedule and the jury lineup.

So far, there’s been no word on whether the rules might change during the season, for instance if the tiebreaker turns out to be overcrowded or the panic button too often leaves contestants without a chance. If that happens, the production says it will announce it through the same channels used for this explanation, via the host and the show’s director.

Kurir published the news about the new rules on September 20 at 10:22 a.m., and Telegraf carried the same statements from Nedeljkovic and Sljivic that same morning, at 9:55 a.m.