SWITZERLAND REVISES ELECTION RESULTS AFTER COUNTING ERROR
Far right performed slightly worse while centrist parties did better than the erroneous count showed.
Switzerland has corrected the results of its federal election, after a human-caused computer error led to support for rightwing populists being overstated.
In a country which prides itself on its precision, the mistake, revealed by the Federal Office of Statistics (BFS) on Wednesday evening, has been greeted with disbelief.
“It’s inexcusable . . . We regret the mistake and we take the incident very seriously,” BFS director-general Georges-Simon Ulrich said at a hastily convened press conference in Bern.
His agency had been overloaded with work, he explained, and checks that should have taken place earlier were not run until Tuesday, two days after the election results were formally declared.
The reason for the error was a human-caused weighting error in the software which tabulated the results. The computer multiplied the vote count in three of Switzerland’s 26 cantons by three to five times.
The three cantons in question — Appenzell Inner Rhodes, Appenzell Outer Rhodes and Glarus — happen to be the most rural and conservative in the whole country, explaining why the far right’s results were overstated at the expense of centrist parties. Women were only allowed to vote in Appenzell Inner Rhodes in 1990, after a federal court ruling forced the canton to change its electoral law.
“The erroneous programming caused a multiple count of the votes cast in the three cantons for the parties in contention. As a result, too many votes were attributed to these parties, which had repercussions at the national level,” the BFS said in a statement.
According to the adjusted results, the hard right Swiss People’s party secured 27.9 per cent of the vote, not 28.6 per cent.
Switzerland’s two Green parties together polled 17.4 per cent, rather than 16.6 per cent.
The Liberals — the party which founded modern Switzerland — came in third place, not fourth, with 14.3 per cent.
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland’s newspaper of record, declared the situation to be a “fiasco” and said the country would have a hard time recovering from the embarrassment.
The corrected results do not affect the allocation of seats in Switzerland’s parliament, but they might have an impact on negotiations over the composition of the seven-person Swiss executive, the Federal Council – which is due to be voted on by parliamentarians in mid-December.
“The history of the 2023 elections must be written,” said Cédric Wermuth, one of the leaders of the social democrats whose party’s share in the election also increased slightly, from 18 per cent to 18.3 per cent.
The Greens have already declared that the adjusted result makes them more likely to fight for a place in government. The seven seats on the Federal Council are allocated between the four largest parties in parliament in a set ratio — 2:2:2:1 — known as “the magic formula”. There is no constitutional basis for the allocation, however.
With a strengthened hand — and a narrative that has subtly shifted in their favour — the Greens are more likely to try and fight for a historic alteration to the ratio in the coming weeks.