Elections in Sweden
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Elections in Sweden are held once every four years. At the highest level, all 349 members of Riksdag, the national parliament of Sweden, are elected in general elections. Elections to the 20 county councils and 290 municipal assemblies – all using almost the same electoral system – are held concurrently with the legislative elections on the second Sunday in September.
Polling station in Gothenburg, 1940 general election
A typical feature of Swedish elections is the handing out of party ballot papers by activists of the different parties outside polling stations on election day. Photo from the 1936 election.
Swedish polling station with an assortment of ballots for different parties.
Open list
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Open list describes any variant of party-list proportional representation where voters have at least some influence on the order in which a party's candidates are elected. This is as opposed to closed list, in which party lists are in a pre-determined, fixed order by the time of the election and gives the general voter no influence at all on the position of the candidates placed on the party list.
Finnish parliamentary election uses the open list method. Here an official poster rack in central Helsinki displays the candidates and their assigned ballot numbers by party.
Ballot during the Finnish parliamentary election of 2011
A campaign bus in Tokyo for (successful) Communist proportional candidate Tomoko Tamura in Japan's 2016 Councillors election. Tamura received roughly half of her votes in Tokyo, other proportional candidates on the same list won most of their votes in other prefectures. The proportional district is nationwide; but limited by a very short legal campaign period, some proportional candidates focus their campaign efforts on only certain regions where they personally or their party have a local base.