[pp.int.general] PP.se EP-status

[Mårten Fjällström]

Hi all,
an update on our preparations for the EP-election. The swedish Pirate  
Party decided this weekend how our ballot will look. Our candidates for  
the EP election are - in list-order:

1 Christian Engström
2 Amelia Andersdotter
3 Mattias Bjärnemalm
4 Anna Troberg
5 Rickard Olsson
6 Rick Falkvinge
7 Anna Svensson
8 Gustav Nipe
9 Johanna Julén
10 Björn Felten
11 Malin Littorin Ferm
12 Jan Lindgren
13 Ellen Söderberg
14 Andreas Larsson
15 Camilla Westrin
16 Snild Dolkow
17 Daniel Nyström
18 C Magnus Berglund
19 Sandra Grosse
20 Mikael Nordfeldth

Some names are familiar to most on this list, most are not. In my humble  
opinion, they are all excellent candidates, pity that Sweden will only  
have 18 seats in the 2009 EP. We have a good gender ratio (within the  
40%-60% bandwidth that is considered equal representation in Sweden) and a  
fairly good geographical spread. We have announced this list today by  
press-releases to the national media as well as targeted press-releases to  
local media where we have at least one candidate. Local media has picked  
up some of it, which bodes well for media access during the election  
campaign.

Swedish election laws mandates that ballots are bought from the election  
authority (latest deadline to order them: 15th of March) but must be  
distributed to polling places by us. The list order is the default order  
of gaining seats, though it can be changed with sufficient amounts of  
preferential voting.

This makes Christian the most likely to enter EP, and we are also going to  
profile him as our EU-spokesperson. Rick is intentionally placed a bit  
down. The party wants him home for the 2010 national elections, though we  
also want him on the list and in teh campaign as he is one of our most  
seasoned debaters.

Our process to decide ballots was like this:
1. A year-long forum discussion about what ballot would maximise our  
chances.
2. Boiling the discussion down to a number of specific bulletpoints. These  
were
	1) A list with a rough distribution of candidates by description
	2) Gender ratio in the 40-60% bandwidth.
	3) Geograpical distribution, in best case scenario almost every county  
would have a representative
3. Electing an internal election committee - who were not allowed (by our  
internal rules) to be on the ballot.
4. Announcement of the possibility to be on the list to all members.
5. The election committee presenting their result in the form of a  
suggested list.
6. Announcement of a member meeting online to decide and the possibility  
to present a counterproposal (with a deadline a week before the voting so  
as to not have surprises). A counterproposal had to exist of a full list,  
so that the lists could be put against each other.
7. Voting - there were 3 proposals, 2 competed fairly evenly, though the  
election committees proposal won by some margin. The voting was  
preferential where voting you could vote for one, two, three or no list.  
If there had been no counterproposals, there would have been a straight  
yes/no vote, a no handing the issue back to the board for further  
deliberation. The voting was open for 27 hours, from saturday at 13:00 to  
sunday at 16:00.

We also decided the process in the early stages, which took quite some  
discussions. It is hard to work out the cinks in a system beforehand, and  
doing so in later stages could easily turned into fights where people  
wanted the rules that would benefit their cnadidates. So I hope the  
process we decided on - and which worked well - could be of interest to  
other pirate parties, even though differences in election law and  
political culture are great within EU. Not to mention the rest of the  
world.

One thing that could have snared it was that we did not decide in advance  
what to do if the voting ended with an exakt stalemate between two or more  
proposals. That should be worked out in advance to next time, fortunately  
it did not happen.

Apart from some paperwork for the ballots we are now focusing on the  
campaign, where we are to a large extent using the contents of the Uppsala  
declaration.

This ended up quite long, hopefully it will be of some use.

Regards,
Mårten Fjällström
Party Secretary PP.SE