Wrong ballots for the visually impaired, school delays and long queues hamper vote counting
Seven and a half million people were called to the polls this Sunday to elect the head of government in a general election marked by increased crime. Until the last day of the campaign, the polls showed a very close race between the left-wing bloc (according to the latest polls it would get between 48.6 and 52.6% of the vote), with the Social Democratic Party (PS) behind. the head – in charge of the executive for the last 28 years -, and from the right (between 47.1% and 49.6%), with the Moderate Party three points lower than the far-right Swedish Democrats. The exit polls showed little distance in the highly divided electorate.
What marked the day most was the chaos. From wrong ballots to long queues of an hour and a half, due to delays in schools, such as the one that happened in Lindholmen, in Gothenburg. The facilities could not be opened in time due to a mix-up with the election materials, which were locked in a room and the workers could not access them, Frida Nowotny, head of the elections in Gothenburg, told Aftonbladet newspaper. Finally, the center was able to open at about 9:00 am, an hour later than planned.
But the mess didn’t stop there. In several polling stations, visually impaired people reported errors on their ballots. The National Confederation of Visual Impairments stated that the electoral authority put the wrong cards in the braille envelopes, causing members of the collective to vote for a different party than they had planned. The actual number of those affected is unknown, but in half a day, four civilians discovered the mess and reported the facts. That is why the association advised them to vote again.
“It’s incredibly annoying, first there was a problem sending the braille election material and now we have discovered that there is an error in the material. This clearly shows that visually impaired voters still do not have the same opportunities to vote under the same conditions to participate in Swedish democracy,” criticized Niklas Mattsson, chairman of the entity.
The Scandinavian law passed in 2019 protecting ballot papers in polling booths to promote secrecy when electing a candidate has slowed the voting rate and led to long queues of up to an hour and a half in some locations, such as in Tygelsjö (outside Malmö), on the Skuru (Nacka) school or in Uppsala, to name just a few examples. According to ‘SVT’, in Sandarne, in the municipality of Söderhamn, two people fainted from the heat while waiting to vote. “There are queues all over Sweden,” they emphasized from the electoral authority, which continued to reassure voters after assuring that if the queues continue at 8:00, when schools close, they will also be allowed to deposit their vote in the ballot box. So who expects the vote count to be delayed more than usual, the entity’s chief of staff Anna Nyqvist told Expressen newspaper.
Election day draws to a close with outgoing Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrat Party), far-right leader Jimmie Åkesson (Swedish Democrats) and Conservative opposition leader Ulf Kristersson (Moderate Party) playing the government post after a campaign targeted to increasing violence in the streets.
Given the wave of crime, they point out to the Swedish Police Association that the body has “lost control, all we do is put out fires temporarily”. Under current laws, they add, “criminals don’t even expect to get caught, because it’s nearly impossible to get a conviction without a plaintiff.” For this reason, they fear that if things continue like this, “without criminal ramifications or sanctions, we will face worse violent crimes.”
Source: La Verdad
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