en/politics/municipal-elections.txt
2004-10-23
Tomorrow: Municipal elections
On Sunday morning, the polls open in Finland's municipal elections. In these elections, representatives of the people are selected to all municipality (city, town or rural district) councils in Finland. Eligible for vote are all citizens over 18 not living abroad and certain foreigners living in Finland. The polls close at 8 pm local time, and early results based on the hand-count of the votes given during advance polling are announced soon after. The full (manual) count is finished around 11 pm local time; partial and full results are announced as they become available. A mandatory manual recount is then performed during the next few days and the official results (essentially never resulting in any significant changes, while close contests may see changes) are announced on Wednesday. The new municipal councils begin their work after new year and sit for four years.
The votes are tallied according to the open list variant of the d'Hondt method. While a voter marks the number of a single candidate on the ballot, the vote is counted toward the total sum of votes received by the candidate's party, and seats are allocated to parties more or less in proportion of votes received. The list of candidates within each party is then sorted in descending order of individual vote count and from the top of the list and the first N candidates are elected, where N is the number of seats allocated to the party.
The upside of this mechanism is that - as long as parties represent true differences of opinion in material issues - the different opinions held by the people are represented faithfully, in miniature, within the municipality council. There is a small bias toward large parties in that fractional numbers of seats tend to get rounded up for large parties and down for small parties, but the system works, nevertheless, fairly well. A preferential system would be my preference (no pun intended:), though.
And now for the good part: I am running in these elections as candidate number 129 in the combined candidate list of Jyväskylä. My party affiliation is the Green League. It is estimated that I would need about 150 votes to get in the city council, though the exact treshold cannot be known in advance.
For the past two weeks, I have been exerting myself in distributing my personal and our party's election materials to people in my local area, as well as standing in the city centre trying to get people vote for me, or alternatively, for other candidates in our party list - or even to vote at all. My body is aching all over, since I have not been very good at exercising before this endeavour.
The end is near: tomorrow evening we will know what will become of this. Please wish me luck :)
21:54 - /en/politics - 0 comments
