Elections in Sweden - County Council Elections

County Council Elections

Elections to Sweden's county councils occur simultaneously with the parliamentary elections on the third Sunday of September, and they use roughly the same electoral system. County elections use individual municipalities—or alternatively groups of municipalities—as electoral constituencies. The number of seats on the county council allocated to each constituency, and the borders of these constituencies, is entirely at the discretion of each county council itself. As mandated by Swedish law, nine out of ten seats on each county council are permanent seats from a particular constituency. The remaining seats are at-large adjustment seats, used to ensure county-wide proportionality with the vote, just as with parliamentary elections.

Unlike in Riksdag elections where the minimum threshold for entry is four percent, county elections use a lower threshold of three percent. Furthermore, the voter eligibility requirements for local elections are different, as discussed above.

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