Democracy in action?

Today is election day in Sweden. Since I had time, I voted yesterday. One thing I'll say in favor of the Swedish election system: it's very convenient. About a month before the election, you get your voter ID in the mail. You don't need to register to vote; if you're eligible you get one. Just don't lose it! With the ID, you could vote by mail, or you could go by one of the designated early voting places, or you could bring it to the polls on election day. There are 3 early voting places in the county, and one of them just happens to be the local post office/lottery ticket outlet/florist that I drive by every day.

For a country that prides itself on being democratic, high-tech and environmentally friendly, I find it odd that the process of voting is none of these. To vote, you stick a little piece of paper in an envelope. We only get to vote for 3 things: city/county council, the regional governing body (Skåne in this case), and the national congress. There are seven major political parties and several more minor and local ones. For each of the three election categories, each party gets a pile of little pieces of paper with their candidates on them. To cut down on the confusion, these are color coded: white, yellow, and blue. Before the election, almost all of the political parties send a few sets of these pieces of paper along with their propaganda to each household. You can bring them when you vote, or you can take them at the poll or early voting location. There are racks of these papers out in the open, so everyone can see which party's papers you take. If you want some semblance of privacy, you could take one of each then throw out the unused ones, but that's a lot of wasted paper! For added amusement, rival political parties like to accuse each other of throwing out their papers.

You then take your little pieces of paper to a tiny triangular desk behind a screen, and stuff one of each color into an envelope. If you wish to vote for a specific person within the party, you may check their name on the list on the little piece of paper, and that moves that name to the top of the list. The number of votes a party gets determines the number of seats they get, and they take the those people in order from the list. There are no primary elections to sort out the candidates, so this isn't so good if you don't like the people on the top of the list. Do you risk trying to elect an individual who you do like in a party that otherwise doesn't impress, or do you play it safe? Of course, this isn't usually much of a problem since I haven't actually heard of most of the people on these lists. We don't actually get to vote for important posts like the prime minister. We vote for the party, and the party chooses the leader.

I was thinking about how Sweden could get away with such a low-tech system with envelopes, and I realized it's because people only get to vote for three positions. Even though there are 49 councilmen for the local city/county council, we only get to vote for one. And one at the state/regional level, and done regional representative at the national level. We do not vote for sheriff, or attorney general, or controller, or school boards, or judges, or even dog catcher. In some ways, that's kind of a relief not to have to care about such, but I suppose the result of that is the incredibly rigid bureaucracy.

I find that I actually miss all the referendums and propositions. We don't get to vote on the issues at all. We're supposed to select a person or party to represent us, yet we often have no idea what they stand for when it comes to the specific issues. At the national level, the party leaders have debates, but we don't get to hear what the people that we actually could vote for think. Everything is very ideological with a phenomenal lace of concrete solutions. This becomes even more frustrating at the local level where even the ideologies seem to break down. At the local level, at least I know what the issues are, which is more than I could say for the regional level.

I've noticed some other things about democracy in Sweden that I find rather alarming. First of all, you can't be conservative without everyone calling you a racist. The worst thing is that the parties that come closest to being conservative actually are racist (or at least openly anti-islam). But just because their opinion makes some people angry, it appalls me that they aren't allowed to voice it. TV and radio stations censored or pulled their ads. Even mailmen refused to deliver their ads. Left wing parties organize protests to shout down anything that they try to say in pubic. They refer to these parties as anti-democratic, yet it seems to me that the reaction to them is what's anti-democratic.