wheany's Journal: Voting in Finland

After reading about the problems with the election in the USA again, I wanted to tell you how voting works in Finland and what the ballots look like.

There are some images of the ballot, and the voting procedure here, but the text is in Finnish. Also, I found one photo here

Basicly, the procedure is this: 1) You prove your identity, get the ballot and get marked as having voted. 2) You go to the polling booth, write the number of your candidate (and nothing else!) inside the circle on the ballot and re-fold the ballot. 3) Go get your ballot stamped and drop it inside the ballot box.

If you are unable to cast your vote yourself, you can get a helper in the booth with you. You can either have your own helper, or you can use the official election helper present at the location. The helper you choose must not be a candidate in the election.

The numbers of all the candidates are on a poster in the polling booth. No canditate has the number "1", the first number is "2."

Well, now that I have already written that text, I noticed that there are English instructions on the site as well. Follow the links on that page for more info, if you're interested.

I'm still not going to delete the text now that I have written it, damn it.