Elections in Sweden

Elections to the 20 county councils (Swedish: landsting) and 290 municipal assemblies (kommunfullmäktige) – all using almost the same electoral system – are held concurrently with the legislative elections on the second Sunday in September (with effect from 2014; until 2010 they had been held on the third Sunday in September).

[2] Expat Swedish citizens may however be removed from the polling register if they do not renew their registration every 10 years.

However, it has occasionally caused individuals to be elected into the city council to represent parties they do not even support as a result of a single voter's vote.

Long-standing Swedish election policy of always displaying the ballot papers for voters to select in public has been criticised as undemocratic and is arguably in contravention of Protocol 1, Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) which stipulates that elections must be free and by secret ballot.

In 2014, a German citizen, Christian Dworeck, reported the lack of secrecy to the European Commission[7] and from 2019 ballot papers are selected behind a screen.

For local elections, any party that is currently represented in the legislative body in question is entitled to free printing of ballot papers.

[10][11] In Riksdag elections, constituencies are usually coterminous with one of the Swedish counties, though the Counties of Stockholm, Skåne (containing Malmö), and Västra Götaland (containing Gothenburg) are divided into smaller electoral constituencies due to their larger populations.

[3] Which candidates from which lists are to secure the seats allocated to the party is determined by two factors: preference votes are first used to choose candidates which pass a certain threshold,[13] then the number of votes cast for the various lists within that party are used.

[3][14][13] In national general elections, any candidates who receive a number of personal votes equal to five percent or greater of the party's total number of votes will automatically be bumped to the top of the list, regardless of their ranking on the list by the party.

[14] Competition between lists is usually more of a feature of campaign strategies than for effective candidate preferences, and does not bear prominently in elections.

[14] Because seats are allocated primarily to the parties and not candidates, the seat of an MP who resigns during their term in office can be taken by a replacement runner-up candidate from their own party (unlike systems such as the United Kingdom, a by-election is not triggered).

The system of replacement runner-up candidates also means that the Prime Minister and their potential members of cabinet appear on ballot papers, but surrender their seats to replacement candidates as they are appointed as ministers (holding both posts is not permitted).

This allows senior party politicians to assume roles as opposition members of parliament if they lose an election.

Seats in the various legislative bodies are allocated amongst the Swedish political parties proportionally using a modified form of the Sainte-Laguë method.

[17] In order to restrict the number of parties which win seats in the Riksdag, a threshold has been put in place.

[22] The unicameral Parliament of Sweden has 349 members: 310 are elected using party-list proportional representation, and 39 using "adjustment seats".

At the 2018 general elections, the red-green coalition consisting of Social Democrats, Greens, and the Left got 40.7% of the votes compared to 40.3% for the Alliance parties, resulting in a single-seat difference between the blocks.