Elections Today! How did you vote?

[TrainingDummy]

Really? You think calling a beat vs. parry is hard? You're gonna tell me that they need to define how punched a chad need to be to count it? 67% punched vs. 63% punched?

j/k

Heh, I fence epee and stay away from all that jibba jabba. Yep, that's a great example of why those machines sucked and it's good they have been abandoned.

[Katman]

I read this title as "Erections Today."

I should go to sleep.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!


In Sweden, we have local, regional, and national votes for members of the governing bodies. all on the same day once every 4th year in September. Sometimes there are also specific referendums on a given issue, but that is unusual. While politicians disagree about all sorts of issues, the mechanics of voting goes smoothly. Here is how our voting goes:

Each party submits an ordered list of candidates for each and every voting area - county parliament, regional candidates for regional parliament, and regional candidates for national parliament. It is the internal business of the parties how they come up with that list, the law is silent on that matter. In some unusual cases, a party will submit more than one list for each geographic area, and the voters who chose that party will select which list to support. It can be a youth- and an ordinary list of the same party in the local election, if the youth section fo the party feels that their candidates do not get high up on the ordinary list. The election law counts those lists together, so this does not hurt the chances of the party doing so.

Each ordered list of candidates is printed on its own piece of paper - white for local elections, blue for regional, and yellow for national. For colorblind people, the lists also have different number of thick black stripes in the corners. There is a tickbox at each candidate´s name. The voter may choose to tick it if he wants to support that candidate, but he is not required to do so and an unticked list is just as good for the party as one with a tick. However, if the voter ticks more than one candidate, or makes any kind of other marking, the list is canceled and his vote for that election is invalid.

Any given election there is typically 10 parties running in any given voting precinct. Most of them, but not all, field candidate lists in all three elections. The national parliament currently has 7 parties, a local county parliament has anything from 4 to 10 parties. Therefore, when a voter comes to the voting station he sees 25-30 piles of candidate lists, each on their own piece of paper. In order to preserve voting privacy, he takes with him a bunch of lists from several different parties when he goes behind the voting screen. There, he ticks any candidate he likes, and puts the lists of the parties that he likes into special voting envelopes, one list in one envelope. The voting envelope is somewhat different from an ordinary letter envelope - its lower corners are cut away, and at the top it is equipped with an extra paper flap which makes it tearable by machine. When the voter has made his selection and licked the envelope shut, the lower corners of the candidate lists are visible at the cutaway corners. However, there is no text printed on the visible part of the corners, so voting privacy is not compromised. The three envelopes are then taken to the voting officials, which then tick off the voter from the list of eligble voters in that precinct, and drop the envelopes into a triply partitioned voting box. A typical voting precinct has some 2000-10000 voters, so even at voting frequencies for 85%+, things do not take too long time.

Swedish voters do not have to register in order to be eligble to vote - the taxation&census bureau maintains a list of citizens which is updated daily with all movements, deaths, and 18th birthdays. It never ever happens that dead Swedes get on the list, nor do people get assigned to the wrong precinct or to multiple precincts. Our T&C bureau gets everything right the first time, every time. That´s right, they simply do not make voter list mistakes whatsoever.

Once the voting time is up, the envelopes are ripped open by a special machine, or by hand in small precincts. The number of candidate lists for each party is counted by hand, at least two times. Each party that gets over 8% of the total vote (in national elections, in regional and local the cutoffs are 5% and 0%) gets places in direct proportion to the quota of its vote tally and the total vote tally of the parties which surpass the cutoff. (Votes for parties which do not make the cutoff do not result in anything, they are wasted). Once the total number of places for a given party in a given political body has been determined, then those places are alloted to the candidates on that list. If a candidate has been ticked by more than 8% of the total voters of his party in that election, he is ranked among the candidates in that list according to the total number of ticks for him. For those candidates which do not reach 8% (the great majority), they are ranked according to the placement on the list - decided by the party - after all candidates which got 8%+ of ticks.

This system has several pros over the Florida ballot:
1. There is only one party on each paper, minimizing the possible level of voter confusion.
2. The only legal alteration to the voting paper, as it is printed, is 1 (one) tick in a box. Anything else than that makes the vote invalid, there is no leeway. This takes away a lot of gray areas.
3. There is only one election on each paper, minimizing the possible level of voter confusion.

Once the vote tally is ready and the members of the elected bodies have been decided upon, they convene to vote upon the executive leader of that geographic area. Put otherwise, our representatives (we have no senators) do double duty as electors. Since the electoral and legislative branch are always controlled by the same party/party coalition, legislative logjam is reduced.

Our system has its own flaws, but voting mechanics and voting integrity is not among them.


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Bayou Bum]

Hi!

... see below ...

Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

I disagree with you on many issues, but I have to admit that you have just provided proof that everyone voting in Sweden is more intelligent than the average person voting in the US. In the US, people have difficulting using a touch screen monitor and just pointing to the candidate of their choice. And while Sweden is able to maintain control over who can vote, it would be impossible to keep up with all of the undocumented immigrants in the US and any attempt would be met with charges of racism. I applaud you for having a system that works for you and you are happy with.

[telkanuru]

A democrat who voted against the right to unionise?

Eh. It was a dumb measure, defeated heavily even here.