Democracy In Action

It's election day in Sweden and Mama and Papa Swede are thrilled to be participating in the democratic process.  What's with all the ballots, you ask?  Well, each party gets their own ballot for each of the three elections taking place.  There's a lot of paper involved.  Obviously Miljöpartiet didn't come up with this system.  And where did they get all those ballots?

From this gauntlet of political thugs standing outside the voting location.  Scary!  Otherwise, there is a box with all of the parties' ballots just inside the doors so you don't have to dis anyone to their face by not taking theirs. 

The Swede wore red and blue to vote in honor of the two major parties and also, I think, because he loves America so much.  American women, anyway.  One in particular, if I may say so.  We're watching the results coming in on television right now and even though Sweden allows people to intimidate you outside the polling station, they concur with the States that ballots ought to be secret so I won't tell you what we think of the results.  Besides that it's pretty exciting to watch the whole thing go down.