Coucou tout le monde!
I got a good break today from my dark hole!! At least so far (it’s almost 5pm so not bad!). I am not looking forward to falling back but I will enjoy my very last cortisone tomorrow morning!! 😉
Anyway in the meantime I am reading about elections in Sweden. Nice. People vote at a very high rate here, around 80%! It could be because they don’t have a very complicated system.
Elections are according to the Universal Suffrage so all citizens above 18 can vote at all elections. People who have established residency in Sweden but are not citizens, like us, can also vote for the region and the commune but not for the parliament. Our commune, Nacka, has an amazing 25% of people who like us, where not born in Sweden! So I find it great that they give us the right to vote! On the contrary Ireland refuses the right to vote to Irish citizen who are not resident in Ireland! Crazy!
Elections are direct meaning that our votes directly and immediately decide on the result.
Seat representation is proportional: % of votes to a party=% of seat at the parliament (parties must win at least 4% of all votes for access the parliament), at the region (at least 3%) or the commune (no limit).
Elections are based on party lists so we vote for a party but we can also choose our favorite candidate within the party if we don’t like the main guy.
There is only one vote for each election, not two rounds as in France. What I like here is that you don’t get to vote as often as in France. I find it confusing there! We vote for the European parliament once every 5 years like the rest of Europe and we vote for everything else (parliament, region and commune) once every 4 years, the same day and at the same place for all three bodies. That’s called the General Elections. The next one is on the 19th of September 2010! I’ll be there!
Because of this single round system, all debates happen before the election and alliances between must be decided before. I find that this recenters the debate on each party’s program so there is less nitty gritty political stuff going on because these guys got 4.5% whereas those got 4.7% and the whole process doesn’t drag on for weeks.
As elsewhere people can vote in advance or ask someone else to vote for them but they can also vote up to 18 days in advance if they know they won’t be around on the D-day and best of all, if they have voted in advance, they are allowed to change their mind! And if they are old and live in the middle of the forest, they can use the local mail service to vote directly from home!!
Voilà !
😉
