However, the Swedish election system is designed to prevent this. Small parties are categorically discriminated against, as they have to pay for and distribute their own ballots, which put a financial as well as a logistical pressure on them.
In other words, we need to visit every single polling station in the country to personally deliver our party's ballots. This opens the door to an extensive sabotage, where voters can easily remove or hide our ballots, with us having no opportunities to deliver new ballots.
For a small party, this takes up a lot of resources that could have otherwise been spent on actual political work.
Furthermore, since a coherent approach towards the smaller parties in practice is lacking in the polling stations, the reception that our party workers receive varies between the polling stations. This leads to frustration and sometimes conflicts, even physical attacks from election supervisors, which we have been subjected to during this election.
In other words, the election system is designed to maintain the power of the big parties and to prevent every challenge towards them. Unlike the smaller parties, the big parties not only get tens of millions of Swedish crowns in party support from the state, they also get both their ballots paid for and distributed to every election district in the country by the state.
- We have done our best election in a long time and every vote matters deeply to us, but we cannot get away from the fact that the Swedish election system is deeply undemocratic and designed to benefit the bigger parties, whose purpose it is to guarantee Swedish capital political stability, explains Andreas Sörensen, party leader for the Communist Party of Sweden.
solidnet.org
