What system does Sweden use to work out the seats in the EU election?
Sweden uses the same method to work out the number of seats each party receives in the EU election as it does in national, regional and municipal elections, the so-called "modified Sainte-Laguë method", only instead of awarding 349 seats, in the EU only 21 are up for grabs.
In Swedish, the process is called jämkade uddatalsmetoden, which literally means "the smoothed-out odd number method".
"It is actually the I think the most fair distribution," argued Henrik Franzon, a statistician at the Swedish election authority, when The Local complained of its complexity.
The way the system works is that each seat is awarded one by one, so over 21 rounds in an EU election and over 349 in a national one.
In the first round, each party has its share of the vote divided by 1.4, with the party with the highest number winning the seat.
In following rounds, any party which has won one seat has its share of the vote divided by 3, with the divisor rising in odd numbers -- so to 5, 7, 9, 11 -- with each additional seat won.
How does it work in practice?
To give an example, in the 2019 EU elections, the Social Democrats, who were the biggest party with 23.48 percent of the vote, won the first seat.
As their votes were from then on divided by 3, the Moderates, Sweden Democrats, Green Party and Christian Democrats all gained their first seat before the Social Democrats were in a position to win their second.
The Left Party, with just 6.8 percent of the vote, had to wait until after the Social Democrats had received their second seat before it was awarded its first.
The Liberal Party, which had just 4.13 percent, had to wait until all the other parties apart from the Christian Democrats had received two seats, before it was awarded its own seat.
You can analyse the 2019 process by looking at the Election Authority's election simulator, which allows you to see how the seats change with different results.
So what percentage of the vote equals a seat?
If you simply divided the number of seats by the share of the vote, each seat would be worth around 4.76 percent, but under the jämkade uddatalsmetoden, the percentage that represents a seat varies depending on how votes are distributed between parties.
Franzén gave what he called "an extreme example" to demonstrate this.
"If we had, let's say, 20 parties that have 3 percent each, and then we have one party that had 40 percent. So 60 percent of the vote was for the 20 parties that didn't make the [4 percent] threshold [for getting into the EU parliament], then that party that had 40 percent would get every seat. So 40 percent of the vote, in that extreme situation, leads to 21 Swedish seats."
This would mean it would require that leading party to receive only 1.9 percent of the vote per seat.
If on the other hand, there were eight parties, all of which passed the threshold with exactly 12.5 percent of the vote, then each party would receive either 2 or 3 seats, with each seat awarded by lot. In this other, even more extreme case, each seat for the two seat parties would have required 6.25 percent of the vote to secure.
So does the system mean that the real threshold for a seat is higher than 4 percent?
Theoretically, it could be.
If, for example, there were 21 parties that each got 4.55 percent of the vote, then it would require more than 4.5 percent to get a seat. However, in Sweden, where there are several parties with at or around 20 percent of the vote, in practice getting four percent guarantees a seat.
If you adjust the 2019 election result so that the Liberal party got only 4 percent of the vote, rather than 4.13 percent, for example, it still would have picked up a seat, although this would have come in the 17th round rather than the 15th round.
If you go one step further, and reduce each of the Liberals, Christian Democrats, and Centre Party to four percent of the vote using the 2019 result, they would also all still win one seat.
This is partly because the "other category" of parties that fall below the threshold typically absorbs about 3 percent of the vote and if one of the parties in parliament at the moment drops out this could rise to 6 percent or more.
This means that on Sunday, any party that does make the threshold is almost guaranteed to get a seat.
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