Elected

Oh yeah, another exam has been handed in, but now I was stopped by the exam-guard who recognized me from TV yesterday. Yes, the whole election fraud was up in the public channels local news. Here, have a look if you are interested, but it's in Swedish for you who don't understand the languish:

There is also a written page so you can google translate if you want to know what's the deal. Unfortunately they didn't offer me a job at SVT as a political commentator... sad really.

You might wonder what the story is about since I haven´t mention it before. It was during the election we had one person urging people to vote for a certain candidate inside the polling station which is against the law indicating that the polling station is a neutral area from politics. So we took it to those handling the election and they contacted the party for the man who was the one that should get the votes. And that was that we thought. No more of that kind during the pre-election, but then came election day and the candidate shows up. Saying hello and then leaving. Apparently this happened according to him, we commit election fraud. The thing is that he appeared while I was opening the outer envelope containing the the envelops with the ballot paper to check if it was in order, no more ballots than elections the voter had the right to vote in and only one ballot for each election, otherwise we have to send it to those handling the election to valuate if it counts or not. This is supposed to be done before 20:00 when the election is over (also to make sure that if people regret their preliminary votes, that can do it over). All according to protocol.

Of course, it could have been just a misunderstanding. Mostly since, frankly, he doesn't seem to know about routines of our work. Especially since he wish to revise the law to make it possible for people who voted at the election day to vote again later on the day (as he put it for the reason that many immigrants have a hard time distinguish the Social Democrats from the Sweden Democrats). There is one huge flaw with that... how are we gonna separate every ballot from each other when we put them in the urn? It's impossible, in that case we need to mark every single ballot with whom you are. That is a crime against the voting freedom in the Swedish constitutional laws and a danger for the whole democratic society. Other than these technicalities there is a flaw in his logic. If we assume that we committed election fraud, why didn't he tell us, ask us or even notified us that day? Why did it take 24 hours? Why didn't he stay to observe if we did anything else? We were completely alone when we counted the votes, but apparently we were trusted enough with that. Too many questions left unanswered.

It didn't help that he was elected in to the local and regional level on personal votes. It shall be interesting to follow this, especially since the decision if we gonna have a re-election in Värmland or not is supposed to be announced today. At least it's nice with some political scientist things amid all the economic stuff.