Hacker News Reader

Are those only the names of the candidates?

No, it's hand written names of parties. Most of them of parties that doesn't exist.

OK. Do hand written names count in Sweden? That's interesting.

(I know that in Germany, every ballot that has anything but one or two Xs on it, is discarded as invalid.)

If it's an exact name of a party then it will be included. Almost all voters use the pre-printed ballots though.

To clarify: to be valid, a hand-written ballot needs to identify the party without there being any confusion. Thus, a ballot saying "Fp" will be counted as a vote for Folkpartiet, but "Socialmoderaterna" would be invalid.

To clarify this further.

This is true if the party in question has ordered ballot papers from the central voting authority. This is (strangely enough) a different thing from being a runner in the election.

So "Donald Duck" and "DONALD DUCK" would count the same iff someone has ordered official ballot paper for Donald Duck party (or similar). They would (or at least should) count individually if not.

Could I run as DONALD DUCK, if Donald Duck was already in the race?

Don't know. You do need 1500 signatures or so to run though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com