a lazy morning, with easy useful tasks
Today is election day, but my shift working at the polls is scheduled to begin till 13:30, so I was able to sleep in and then do useful stuff, like repaint the spot on the bathroom window ledgeframethat has lost its paint.
I even got a nap before lunch and heading to work.
the election itself
I arrived to work in good time, and settled in first to the drop the polls into the box station.
The way it worlds in Sweden is that the “valsedlar”, (little bits of paper, each with the name of a political party) are set out in a cardboard display box, with a little pocket for each party. As each person arrives to vote they go behind the screen, choose one piece of paper for each of the election level.
This year we have three levels:
- Riksdag, the national government, yellow papers
- Regionvalet, the regional government (equivalent to state), blue papers
- Kommunen, the local level (city council, where “city” usually includes some surrounding countryside), white papers.
Each voter gets three envelopes, goes behind the screen, and selects one piece of paper in each colour, puts it one in each envelope, and then brings them to our table, where one of us inspects the envelopes, while the other takes their ID, and finds them on the polling list.
The envelopes have a tiny window hole at one edge, just big enough to show how many pieces of paper are in the envelope, and which colour. In case of colour blindness, the blue ones also have a single black bar that just shows in the window, the yellow has a double black bar, and the white have no bars, so one can still tell which type is in each envelope.
If there is more than one paper in (an) envelope(s), or they wrote on any of the envelopes, or a paper doesn’t show through the window (either because they forgot, or because they folded it first), we send them back to try again, with a new envelope. Most people get it right the first try, but one we had to send back three times before they understood the requirements for the task.
Once the envelopes have passed inspection the ritual begins:
Röstmottagare 1: “(Voters name), has voting rights in three elections and can turn in, one yellow”
Röstmottagare 2: “One yellow”, as they drop the yellow ballot in its envelope into the box with a yellow lid, and person 1 draws a diagonsl line through the corresponding box next to their name.
Röstmottagare 1: “One white”
Röstmottagare 2: “One white”, as they drop the white ballot in its envelope into the box with a white lid, and person 1 draws a diagonsl line through the corresponding box next to their name..
Röstmottagare 1: “One blue”
Röstmottagare 2: “One blue”, as they drop the blue ballot in its envelope into the box with a blue lid, and person 1 draws a diagonsl line through the corresponding box next to their name.
Sometimes a person is only registered/approved for a subset of these elections, in which case the appropriate box(es) on the list are blacked out to show that they don’t vote in that one, and so we only drop in the ones they are allowed to vote into the boxes. Most people in this situation know it, and have only prepared the correct number of envelopes, with the correct number and colour of papers in them.
förtidsröster
Whever there is a lull in people coming up with their ballots we go through the box of “förtidsröster” (the votes people turned in, at any approved polling place across the country, in advance of election day.) These come with the three, unmarked balot envelopes in a larger envelope that shows that the voter’s right to vote and identy were both checked on the day they filled in the ballots, and it shows their voting number on our list.
For each box of förtidsröster we recieve, we double check that they were sent to the correct piling pkace (Lövånger is 1001), then find the voter on the list and write a P (for preliminary), in each box by their name for the elections they voted in.
Anyone who voted in advance can change their mind and vote again in election day (but only at their assigned polling place). If this happens after we have recorded their “P”s, we draw a line through the “P”s, and find the envelope with their förtidsröst, remove them, and put them, unopened and unread, in a bag labeled to show that these no longer count as the person chose to vote again.
If we get to their förtidsröst after they have come in and voted on the day, we still put the preliminary votes into the marked bag.
There was just enough time to finish recording which förtidsröster have arrived in the list before the polls close at 20:00.
It is only then that we drop the förtidsröster i to their respective ballot boxes.
counting
From 20:00 to 02:00 we counted votes.
First I went through the book with the list of voters, counted how many voted on each page for each election, and also recorded the totals for each page in a spreadsheet, which did the math for me.
We had 76% voter turnout of people registered in Lövånger for the national elections and 78% for the local and regional elections.
Once we knew how many votes there should be in each box we started counting.
Dump the contents of one box on the table, and all 8 of us started tearing off the perforated edge, removing the paper, and stacking them in piles by party.
There are eight main parties, and a bunch of other minor ones.
Once the votes are sorted by piles they are counted, at least twice each pile, and the totals recorded, and the totals submitted to the election central as soon as we are confident we have the correct values.
Then repeat for the next box, and the one after that.
our results
I, of course, put the totals in a spreadsheet, and compared them with the published prelimary results for the national elections as of 16:00 on Monday:
| Party | Lövånger | national as of 16:15 the next day | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| övrigt | 12 | 99776 | ||
| blanka | 6 | |||
| ögilt | 7 | |||
| Sub total for the “left” | 25 | 2.01% | 99776 | 1.57% |
| Vänsterpartiet | 80 | 6.43% | 525530 | 8.25% |
| Socialdemokraterna | 430 | 34.57% | 1788859 | 28.07% |
| Miljöpartiet | 94 | 7.56% | 388973 | 6.10% |
| Centerpartiet | 153 | 12.30% | 449690 | 7.06% |
| total | 757 | 60.85% | 3153052 | 49.47% |
| Liberalerna | 45 | 3.62% | 341944 | 5.37% |
| Kristdemokraterna | 94 | 7.56% | 395483 | 6.21% |
| Moderaterna | 155 | 12.46% | 1265253 | 19.85% |
| Sverigedemokraterna | 168 | 13.50% | 1117694 | 17.54% |
| sub total for the right | 462 | 37.14% | 3120374 | 48.96% |
So, had the whole country voted as we did, there would be a clear majority instead of waiting for final counts and negotiations. Edited to add a link to the published results for Lövånger, that I found four days later: https://valresultat.svt.se/2026/kommunval-24821001-lovanger.html
winding down after
I got home just after 02:00, and took some time to empty the cat litter, put spackel in the low spots on the bathroom window ledge, pet the cats, do yoga, and just relax reading facebook, before heading to bed just after 03:00.
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