PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: Spoiled ballots at a record level

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Aside from the drop in voter turnout from two weeks ago, during the second round of the presidential elections no less than around 25,095 of the cast votes, in other words just under one per cent of the total, were regarded as spoilt or inadmissible. In the first round, 9,900 votes were disqualified, which brings the total number of discarded ballots for the election to 35,000.
      In the previous presidential elections of 2006, when Tarja Halonen defeated Sauli Niinistö in the second round, the number of inappropriate and inadmissible votes was about 8,800 in the first round and about 16,300 in the second round runoff.
     
According to the Tampere daily Aamulehti, in this election all the records were smashed, as in the second round the number of discarded ballots was larger than ever before in the history of direct voting to elect a Finnish head of state.
      Also, the number of disqualified votes in the entire election was a record high.
     
Full details are not in, but it seems likely that the spoiled ballot papers were concentrated particularly in those areas of the country where neither candidate enjoyed the support of a large part of the electorate, for example in the north and east, where the Centre Party's Paavo Väyrynen and - to a lesser extent - the Finns Party's Timo Soini had dominated in the first round.
      In the Lapland constituency, for example, the figure was 1.7% on election day, and in Väyrynen's own electoral district of Keminmaa it reached 2.3% of all votes cast on Sunday.
      Eurosceptic Väyrynen's name and his number from the first round appeared on an appreciable number of the inadmissible voting slips found around the country, along with the usual suspects such as Donald Duck, obscene drawings (including the steaming turd shown here), and even Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin.


Links:
  MInistry of Justice Election Portal - Presidential Election 2012 Complete Results

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