No surprise that North Korea was at the bottom of the rankings.

No, certainly not. I wonder how long it will take for the map to turn 50 percent green. A problem might be that many of the countries that are not democracies don't know what it means and therefore don't long for it. But I may be prejudiced in believing that.

Surprised to see how green South America was to be honest. I feel that would have looked quite different 20/30 years ago.

Yes, and Uruguay is even more democratic than the USA.

I can imagine that the Russian involvement did not Help in the judgement of the USA.

I also have heard that the process of registering to be able to vote in the US makes it very hard for many people to vote. Living in Sweden, where you are automatically registered to vote, this sounds odd. Once an election comes up you just bring your ID to the voting venue and follow the instructions. Of course there are imperfections in the Swedish voting system as well, but in general, I think it is pretty good.

#6 That's a good point, in the UK you have to register to vote! But I believe there may be a fine if you don't register so that encourages people to do so.

So you have to register to vote, but you don't have to vote in the UK?

#8 Yeah I believe so! Maybe Jordan will know more than me!

#8 Yeah, what Leia said was true in that mandatory voting is not compulsory. It may make for some hard reading after the election to only see 60% of the electorate actually voting, but it avoids some cases (as is seen in Australia) where everyone has to vote, but do not inform themselves sufficiently to make a well thought out choice.

In our latest election, 87 percent of those eligible to vote did so. No one has to manually register to vote and no one has to vote. Still at least four out of five usually vote in Sweden. Whether they keep themselves informed is another matter. 😉

What voting system do Sweden use? In the UK we have First Past the Post (FPTP), which generally leads to a two party system. I think this doesn't Help with voter apathy, due to the lack of options one might have.

I had no idea so I looked it up. It’s a “proportional representation” system.

”The electoral system used is proportional representation; consequently, the share of seats any party receives in the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) generally reflects the share of all the votes received by that party.”

» The Swedish electoral system - Valmyndigheten

Ahh I see! We had a referendum almost 10 years ago now that offered the chance to switch to a system closer to PR (it still had elements of FPTP in it). Sadly though no one came to vote on it 

So they scrapped it for lack of interest?

It went ahead, but only only 41% of the electorate voted. Whether that is a fair result considering less than half actually bothered to vote is contested, but with Brexit causing this much chaos I don't see another referendum anytime soon.

Okay.