Code error led to the wrong election result in Sweden
A code error led to the Swedish Democrats bereft of a mandate during the general elections in Sweden. Damn uncomfortable, says the official behind the snafu.
The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has talked to an electoral official in a constituency in Västra Götaland, who explains how the error came to be.
The official first reported the preliminary result for the parliamentary elections to the Electoral Authority (Valmyndigheten), then the municipal elections results and finally for the county council (landsting).
– In Västra Götaland, we have no county council but a region. It was late at night and I made a mistake, admits the election official.
Code error
The result of the county council election was incorrectly coded with an R (Riksdag), which is the code for the parliamentary elections.
The person who received the phone at the Election Authority, therefore, recorded incorrect results from the constituency, which gave the Centre Party one mandate too many, at the expense of the Sweden Democrats.
– Damn uncomfortable that it turned out like that. You can say that this is a system error, but I think that it’s too easy to make that kind of an error, says the official.
Was discovered
The error was discovered during the regular re-count of ballots and resulted in the Alliance losing one representative.
The red-green parties thus increased the lead in Sunday’s election to two mandates in the Swedish Parliament. The bourgeois parties in the Alliance received 142.
The Swedish Democrats, which neither of the two blocs wishes to cooperate with, ends up with 63 representatives.
The election results are preliminary, the final result will be presented on Friday. The counting of around 200,000 precast and votes from abroad will be completed on Wednesday. Quite a few of which are cast in Norway.
© NTB scanpix / #Norway Today