The turnout and vote count after election night

According to early Monday morning's data from the Swedish Electoral Authority, the voter turnout amounts to 80.3 percent. That would be the lowest percentage since 2002 and rank among the worst results since World War II.

But it's not that bad. With a record high early voting and a larger number of foreign votes than usual, the percentage will most likely rise by a few percentage points. At the time of writing, just over 6.4 million votes have been counted, which means that if there were 320,000 votes remaining to be counted, the turnout would increase to over 85 percent.

From the point of view of democracy, the preliminary figure for invalid votes also looks deplorable – 28,264. But in the last election, for example, the corresponding number was 34,145 and was then written down to 5,567 when the handwritten votes were examined more closely on Wednesday.

- Invalid votes in the preliminary are expressed as "if you cannot interpret the voter's will" and then they are put aside. In the county administrations' final count, they do their utmost and each ballot is analyzed carefully, says Lars Aden Lisinski at the Swedish Election Authority's press service

Another observation from election night has been the relatively long time it took for the vote count. It has at least partly to do with Postnord's difficulties in delivering the unusually high number of early votes to the polling stations in Greater Stockholm on Sunday. The election authority can reassure worried voters that it will not affect the final election results, just possibly cause a greater workload for election officials.