Swedish election 2010

[Gustaf]

Smaller lead for government in United Minds, larger in Synovate and Demoskop.

[Gustaf]

I've looked at the polls, and the redgreens are catching up, no doubt about it. The question is whether it will be enough or not and I personally doubt that.

I'm 95% certain we will wake up on Monday with a hung parliament.

Prediction:

M: 29.5%
S: 31.2%
MP: 9.7%
C: 6.6%
FP: 6.1%
KD: 5.3%
V: 5.5%
SD: 5.1%

Others: 1%
Blue bloc: 47.5%
Redgreen: 46.4%

Margin: 1.1%

Margin for majority: -4%

I could be more optimistic but I'm not an optimistic person.

[Gustaf]

So the Socialdemocrats stand a good chance of remaining the largest party? That'd make this election slightly less annoying in my book.

Oh, and I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news but in my (long) experience with them the far right has never underpolled just slightly; they tend to underpoll a lot. Whose voters are they stealing anyway? They could wind up seriously hurting both the more rightwing bourgeois parties and the socialdemocrats (disaffected working class voters are quite open to far right populism).

The Sweden Democrats didn't underpoll that much in 2006 though, only about 1%.

[Gustaf]

I'm being a tad pessimistic, but I like to hedge that way.

I think S has a 55-45 chance of being the biggest party. They're slightly ahead in the polls now and have momentum on their side.

It's hard to tell which side gets hurt the most by Sweden Democrats. I have a feeling they mostly take voters who wouldn't vote otherwise (at least on the margin).

[Gustaf]

Is it correct that in Sweden members of each party are distributing ballot papers of their own party to voters outside of voting booths ?

Therefore many voters are just taking their ballot papers from home to the voting booth or pick ballot papers from more than 1 party in front of the voting booth and take them into the booth, so that no other person can see which party he/she is voting for ?

Or something like this I have read today

Yes, that is correct. Apart from the "taking ballot papers from home to the voting booth" part, because I never heard of anyone doing that.

[Gustaf]

Just got home.

To answer some of the questions posed here:

1. Robertsfors is the home of C-leader Maud Olofsson.

2. SAP did horribly in Norrbotten in 1998 and still seem to be rebounding from it.

3. It's not going to be a majority.

4. Apart from the last four years Sweden has not had a majority government since 1981. But the last time it was a similar situation (1991-1994) it was troublesome.

5. Stockholm is always odd. M probably was hurt by tactical voting there, imo.

[Gustaf]

Absolute disaster for SAP in Malmö btw. Not being the largest party there is a real blow for them.

And SD has really gone national. They're still weak in most of Norrland and in Stockholm, but they're a presence in a lot of places where they didn't use to exist before.

[Gustaf]

Reinfeldt probably pulled up the national numbers for M. S historically does badly in local elections, so this is a new trend.

Skåne is probably an area where S has suffered greatly due to immigration issues.

[Gustaf]

Also, trust in politicians is record high this election. Education was the biggest issue for voters.

[Gustaf]

Education was the biggest issue for voters.

So they vote in the far-right? Irony.

The 5% who voted for SD probably didn't have education as their top issue. They usually list another one...

Anyway, 48% of SD voters label themselves as right, 20% as left and 32% as neither.

And Feminist Initiative got local seats in Simrishamn, the home of the party leader, with almost 10% of the local vote.

[Gustaf]

And Feminist Initiative got local seats in Simrishamn, the home of the party leader, with almost 10% of the local vote.

Given than the women's right are well-avanced in Sweden, I suppose than this is an radical and extremist party?

I think they want to abolish marriage or something.

They want to legalize marriage between several people at the same time. Basically, take every conservative stereotype of feminists you've ever heard about and you have them.

Looking at local results across the country there will be hell to form majorities. SD holds the balance everywhere.

[Gustaf]

The Redgreen parties have taken clear stances - they will

1. not give the Sweden Democrats any position from which to influence policy
2. not support the Alliance in any way

(3. no longer obey the laws of logic...)

[Gustaf]

People who vote from abroad or do early voting on election day (i.e. mailing ballots from the wrong place on election day) get their votes counted on Wednesday. They're called Wednesday-votes and can move a few votes around.

[Gustaf]

The quirks in the election law apparently robbed the Alliance of 2 seats. Given how close they were to 173, once the Wednesday votes are counted the lack of mathematical precision might have cost them a majority, claims a professor in mathematics in today's paper.

[Gustaf]

It's a d'Hondt but dividing by 1.4 in the beginning instead of 1 (IIRC).

The problem is that large parties get too many seats from the regional distribution and the evening out seats are too few. So SAP get overrepresented from those seats.

[Gustaf]

Any idea as to why M lost votes in their strongholds? Who benefited from that? FP?

Part of it was probably that M-majorities had pursued unpopular policies in some of those areas. In Täby for instance they sold out all public schools to private companies/persons, in some cases in shady circumstances.

Part of it was probably that big city voters (where M is traditionally strong) are more subject to campaigns and were more likely to vote tactically for C and KD.

On the local level FP was often the beneficiary though.

[Gustaf]

Are the Swedish Democrats not considered a coalition partner merely because they support massive immigration reduction, or for other reasons? Or to ask the question in another way, if a mainstream party all of a sudden became supportive of far less immigration than the status quo, does that make them all of a sudden no longer potential participants in a coalition party?

Short answer, yes. Because of immigration reduction. But it is also the fact that SD started out as a Nazi party. An established party could sell being anti-immigration with less accusations of being racist. We will likely see moves toward less immigration.

[Gustaf]

It's a d'Hondt Sainte-Laguë but dividing by 1.4 in the beginning instead of 1 (IIRC according to Wikipedia).

The problem is that large parties get too many seats from the regional distribution and the evening out seats are too few. So SAP get overrepresented from those seats.

Corrected (I believe).  The "modified Sainte-Laguë" method used in Sweden and some other countries (divisors starting at 1.4 and then going 3, 5, 7, ...) is still better for the smaller parties than d'Hondt (divisors starting at 1 and then going 2, 3, 4, ...), although just a smidgin better between the first and second seats (3/1.4 = approx. 2.14 times the divisor for the second seat as the first in modified Sainte-Laguë compared to 2/1 = 2 times the divisor for the second seat as the first in d'Hondt, while 3/1 = 3 times the divisor for the second seat as the first in pure Sainte-Laguë).  If no party winds up with exactly one seat (which wouldn't seem to be possible with the 4% threshold unless a lower polling party won a local seat and the formula wouldn't seem to matter there anyway), Sweden's method would seem to yield the same result as pure Sainte-Laguë.  Not sure how exactly the subnational seats impact all this though.

Ah, thanks for the correction. I'm never going to convince my memory that it isn't d'Hondt though...

The problem, as I gather, is basically that there are too many subregions (about 25 or so), so many of them have few seats. The result of this, in combination with the 1.4 division, is that the larger parties take too many seats in the regional distribution. This is supposed to be compensated with the extra seats added at the end. The problem is that M and especially SAP were already overrepresented, even as a share of the total number of seats, from the regional seats. It's basically the same situation debated before the last German election, if anyone recalls that one.

[Gustaf]

A cute little SD-poster from back in the good old 90s.



Translation:

"Sweden wake up!
Problem: mass immigration.
Effect: poverty.
Solution: return trip.

Sweden Democrats

WARNING!
to Swedish girls!

Avoid unprotected sex with negroes who carry deadly AIDS!
Most preferably: do not defile your race, Your Sweden, Your family and relatives.
Abort only as a last resort.
Keep Sweden Swedish"

So, yeah, they're not coming from a great background or anything.

[Gustaf]

massive ticket splitting between municipal and diet elections. In Danderyd (Chelsea of Sweden) Centre party got over 20 percent.

Insert joke about Chelsea Tractors here!

There was a heavy swing against M in their strongest areas, conspiciously the areas where they have basically had one-party rule and probably been a bit corrupt.

As a side-note, it is apparently mathematically possible for the Alliance to take the majority with Wednesday votes. According to some math professor a strong V-vote in Dalarna might counter-intuitively do the trick. Some political science professor called it a 50-50 chance which I don't buy for a second.

MP continues to play coy. I honestly don't get it.

[Gustaf]

Ok, here's the thing. Using historical trends from monday to wednesday counts the Alliance should take 2 more seats.

It seems however that they would need FP to increase by 37 more votes in Värmland than historically in order to get the 3rd one. Having looked at the numbers, it apparently isn't as preposterous as I originally thought.

[Gustaf]

The Alliance took another seat in Dalarna. It appears as if they missed a seat in Gothenburg by 4 votes. Right now it looks like those 4 votes might decide the election.

[Gustaf]

Update: the Alliance is apparently expected to take another seat from Värmland. Thus, the 4 votes in Gothenburg will decide the whole thing. We're going to have to wait for the recount by local authorities (who have the final say on whether ballots are thrown out or not)

[Gustaf]

They didn't get the seat in Värmland, but it might because rules during the vote counting were violated. For this reason the municipality of Arvika might have to hold a revote in November.

The Gothenburg result stands though, so it doesn't really matter. The Alliance gets 173, with 175 needed for majority. Now, negotiations will ensue.

[Gustaf]

One locally elected (councilman might be the best equivalent) from SD leaves the party citing as his reason that he read their platform. Yes, seriously. He says the immigrants are his friends and he cannot stay.

Another SD councilman turns out to be a practicing shaman. Again, yes, seriously.

And the hysterics over SD continues to reach bizarre levels in the media and on Facebook.