A local election for city council in the Swedish municipality of Vaggeryd was voided after the populist Sweden Democrats receiving no votes, despite candidates claiming they voted for themselves.
The voiding comes after the two candidates, who had given their permission to be on the Sweden Democrat’s list, appealed the election result after finding they had not received a single vote, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
After reviewing the case, the Electoral Review Board has ordered the County Administrative Board to correct the voting discrepancies by reviewing the votes and recounting the tally again.
Stig Svensson, one of the candidates who appealed the election result, commented on the case saying, “Our two voices mean very little, but for us personally, it means a lot. Right should be right.”
“The error was when they were registered to the Election Authority. The ballot papers with their names were put up, but they were never checked in when they were to be sent away,” said Jens Mattsson, press officer at the Jönköping County Administrative Board.
The election discrepancy comes after Sweden received severe criticism last year from election observers during the country’s national elections with one veteran Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observer going as far as to comment that the election system was “undemocratic.”
Danish delegate Michael Aastrup Jensen said, “In all the many election observations I’ve been on, I have not seen anything that comes close to how undemocratic the Swedish voting system is.”
His comments, along with others, were reflected in an OSCE report published in November which stated that “consideration should be given to further measures to ensure the secrecy of the vote,” and claimed that observers had noticed in some areas that ballots for the Sweden Democrats had gone missing.