Judging a speech contest

Judges face all sorts of problems and need guidance. A first-timer may have difficulty simply listing the foreign sounding names in the columns. Then you might think speaker a) is a clear winner, so is b), so is d), and by the time you've got to e) you can't remember a). You might have trouble adding up all the scores, or be so busy writing numbers that you miss the gestures and don't hear the jokes.
You could hear four bad speeches and have a clear winner but all runners up are equally good or bad. One speech may have great content badly delivered, whilst another has no content, purely entertaining, and be highly amusing.
Once I was advised, if in doubt, forget the score and go for which you liked the most. My ultimate decisive factor is - if I were running a social club or business and had to invite a speaker, who would be my first choice? If they were unavailable, who would be second?
Another system I use is to rate each speaker against the previous one.  That way you don't have to compare c) with a). If a) is good and b) is better than a) and c) is better than b) you have your ranking.
I also use a star for each really good prop, piece of advice or turn of phrase. Sometimes all the speeches are brilliant.
Ultimately the top score goes to the one whose message will stay in years to come.
It would be enormously useful to hear judges before a contest saying what they are looking for. This would help speakers and other judges. This could be done anonymously.