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Just a comment from another Swede:

It is not mandatory with an ID card, not even to vote, see: http://www.val.se/det_svenska_...

Google translation of the second paragraph (yeah, I'm lazy):

Do I have to show identification when I vote?

You must prove your identity to vote. You can prove your identity in three ways:
1. Be known by the voice receiver
2. Show ID document
3. Any other person can vouch for your identity. Then the one who vouches show his ID. The social security number of the person who vouches written down in the electoral roll.

In sweden we have a similar write-in system, where you can write your own party on a blank ballot.

There's also an online summary after each election, showing all kinds of neat statistics (like this).

They also publish each and every one of the write-in votes (without names of voters, of course) and those results make it painfully obvious that you can't get anywhere if you're such a party. Try searching for "anka" (duck) in that page to see the astounding number of people who voted for the Donald Duck party, except "Kalle Anka Partiet", "kalle anka partiet", etc are counted as separate parties.
It is a neat place to voice your disapproval (Every now and then you see someone voting for "THEY'RE ALL CROOKS"), but it serves absolutely no purpose for actual election results.

I remind you that the Pirate Party is the third-largest party in Sweden

I'm sorry to tell you that you're very misinformed. The Swedish parliament is made up of 8 parties, and none of them is the Pirate Party. They received 0.65% of the votes in 2006 and 0.63% in 2010, and 4% is required to get a seat in the parliament, making them very far away from that. (check this: http://www.val.se/)

They did however do much better in the 2009 elections for the EU parliament, where they received over 7% of the Swedish votes (making them the fifth largest party). I would speculate that this is largely due to the much lower participation (~45% in the EU election versus ~85% in the national), making the EU parliamentary elections much more prone to small parties getting an disproportionate amount of votes compared to the national parliament elections. (And I'm very happy for that, I think the Pirate Party provides some clue in areas that other parties are completely clueless about - however, in the big EU issues they anyway tend to side with the green parties, who usually also have a similar stance when it comes to tech-related politics.)

According to the Swedish Election Authority's published hand written votes, Donald Duck got one vote and the Pirate Party got ~500.

You seem to think that paper voting systems by neccessity depend on transporting all the ballots to a central location, where they'll be counted.

This is how paper voting works in Sweden.

To summarize and simplify:

• On election night, the ballots are hand-counted by election officials at every polling station. Results are phoned in to the authorities and tallied, and made available to the general public. (Basically an entire database dump of vote tallies in every district is made available as an XML over the Internet. Pretty cool.)
• Afterwards, ballot boxes are sealed and sent to the local county to be counted again.

• It goes without saying that Sweden is not directly comparable to Brazil, but consider this for a moment. It doesn't require all ballots to be hand-delivered to a central location where they will be counted - it's scalable. And no less secure than electronic voting. Probably just as secure technically, and more secure in practice, because it's easier to see when funny stuff happens to ballots in boxes than when bits are flipped.

The 7.1% the Pirate Party got gives them one seat. See http://www.val.se/val/ep2009/valnatt/rike/index.html [www.val.se]. It is incredibly unlikely that they'd get another one.

They'll get another one of the Lisbon treaty is passed, an issue the PP is against, but will probably happen anyway.

for the lazy

The 7.1% the Pirate Party got gives them one seat. See http://www.val.se/val/ep2009/valnatt/rike/index.html. It is incredibly unlikely that they'd get another one. Nearly all of the advance votes have already been counted.

The advance votes get sent to the polling station where one would have normally voted on and are counted as part of the normal counting process. See http://www.val.se/in_english/2009_ep_election/index.html. Those advance votes that aren't counted yet are those advance votes that were placed on Sunday, which are relatively few given Sunday was the ordinary election day.

Anyhow the final count will be available on Wednesday.

The 7.1% the Pirate Party got gives them one seat. See http://www.val.se/val/ep2009/valnatt/rike/index.html. It is incredibly unlikely that they'd get another one. Nearly all of the advance votes have already been counted.

The advance votes get sent to the polling station where one would have normally voted on and are counted as part of the normal counting process. See http://www.val.se/in_english/2009_ep_election/index.html. Those advance votes that aren't counted yet are those advance votes that were placed on Sunday, which are relatively few given Sunday was the ordinary election day.

Anyhow the final count will be available on Wednesday.

Democracy in practice don't work like that though. Instead you vote for the people that you agree with when there's an election.
Unfortunately there usually aren't anyone that wants to legalize piracy, and even if there are, people still need to vote for them.
Just because 50% of the population is into piracy, it doesn't make those 50% vote for them.

An example of this is the swedish election year 2006, where "Piratpartiet" participated with the intention of changing laws regarding intellectual property and copyrights.
They only got 0.63% of the votes.

References:
http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/ovrig a.html
(Third from the top)

Registration of a party is solely for protecting the party's official name.

Correct. It prevents others from nominating candidates and ordering ballots using your party name.

If the Donald Duck Party got sufficient write-in votes to be represented in parliament, in principle the first person to claim to represent it would be able to dish out the seats as he saw fit.

Wrong. Any seats won by the party will be assigned to the candidates for that party with the highest number of votes, according to a complicated (but reasonable) vote counting algorithm. The party can only nominate candidates before the election, but the ultimate choice is made by the voters alone, by either giving one candidate a preferential vote or using a ballot with a specific ordering of the candidates (a single party may have several different ballots printed). Once election day is over and the votes are being counted, the party has no say in the matter of who gets a particular seat.

Fortunately, at a little over 100 votes, this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Indeed, at least in the election for parliament. However, the same voting system is used at the county council and municipal levels, and within a small municipality, 100-200 write-in votes may very well be enough to get a seat in your local assembly. If none of those ballots indicate a single eligible candidate, and the party (if it exists) hasn't nominated any candidates, nobody will be allowed to take that seat (it has happened).

Not sure what you mean by that. In Sweden it works like this: To be counted as a real vote, you have to have a registered party, which in turn needs to have demonstrated at least a minimal demand for the party (collecting signatures). This party, until reaching 1% or more in an election has to pay for its own ballots, but only a few appointed printing companies are allowed to actually create them. Anything outside these rules are automatically considered invalid votes.

Wrong. Registration of a party is solely for protecting the party's official name. If the Donald Duck Party got sufficient write-in votes to be represented in parliament, in principle the first person to claim to represent it would be able to dish out the seats as he saw fit. Fortunately, at a little over 100 votes, this is unlikely to happen any time soon. (More info, in Swedish)

Er, no. In the 2004 US election, the Mickey Mouse vote constituted less than 1/2000th of the total vote. In fact, the FEC report seems to indicate a total of six votes, all in Rhode Island. For comparison, with the final count nearly complete, variations of "The Donald Duck Party" have recieved 103 votes in the Swedish election, or 0.0019%. A more useful comparision is that the Pirate Party (currently at 34,573 votes, or 0.63%) is ahead of the Swedish Senior Citizen Interest Party and the June List, both of which have been around longer and been percieved as serious candidates for parliament by the media, and is not far behind the Feminist Initiative (0.68%), which has the advantage of being led by a quite popular previous leader of a party with parliamentary representation, having recieved at least some funding and having attracted several celebrites.

So slashdot reports that Wired reports that the leader of the Pirate Party said that the results were...

Uhm, people, you can check this for yourselves:

http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/ovrig a.html

If you prefer the full election result in XML format, you can find it here:

http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/xml/slutresu ltat_00R.xml

Although please note that they're not finished counting yet, they've done 4626 out of 6177 districts, so check back regularly for updates and the final result.

So slashdot reports that Wired reports that the leader of the Pirate Party said that the results were...

Uhm, people, you can check this for yourselves:

http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/ovrig a.html

If you prefer the full election result in XML format, you can find it here:

http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/xml/slutresu ltat_00R.xml

Although please note that they're not finished counting yet, they've done 4626 out of 6177 districts, so check back regularly for updates and the final result.

The Swedish election authority currently lists them at 0.64%, with about half of the districts being processed.

"Voting rights to Riksdag elections are reserved for all Swedish citizen who are 18 years of age before or on Election Day and who are, or have at some time been, registered residents of Sweden." - Info from the Swedish election authority

what we need is simplicity when it comes to voting, not complexity

Amen!

The elections in Sweden uses paper ballots that you put in envelopes. Usually, very accurate preliminary results are available just some hours after the election is closed. And the counting is done by people, not machines. I would say that the public trust in the election procedures is very high although there have been cases of cheating (a case when a party person "helped" mentally handicapped people to vote).

In the Swedish elections, you (1) choose a party by selecting a ballot and (2) optionally select a person from a list on the ballot by using a pen. In cases where the pen markings are illegible, the party still gets the vote.

If there is a Yes/No election, we have Yes ballots and No ballots.

One thing that differs from the American system is that Swedish elections normally vote on three or four things at the same day. I believe that Americans vote on many more things.

If you are interested, visit the election web site and click on "international" for english text. ("val" means "election")

http://www.val.se/