The results of Sunday's municipal and county elections have seen some candidates elected to office with a very small number of votes.
The successful candidate with the least number of personal votes was Daniel Zilliacus (Left), who secured a seat on the Kimitoön municipal council with the backing of just two votes.
Kimitoön is a majority-Swedish-speaking municipality near Salo, in the southwest of the country, and called Kemiönsaari in Finnish.
"This is how politics works in Finland. But I have to be honest and say that it was quite comical," Zilliacus told Yle.
Finland uses the d'Hondt proportional representation voting system. This means that voters choose one candidate from party lists and when the results come in, candidates are arranged in order of popularity.
Each party is then allocated seats in proportion to their vote share — therefore a candidate may still get elected even if they personally garnered a low number of votes.
In Zilliacus' case, his party — the Left Alliance — was the second-largest party in Kimitoön and therefore secured five seats on the council.
Zilliacus told Yle that he received a significantly higher number of votes when he stood in the last municipal election, in 2021, but he did not end up getting elected. He explained that he did not have much time to campaign this time around due to work commitments, which may account for why he received just two votes.
Elsewhere in the country, three votes were enough for Centre Party candidate Eerika Koivutalo to win a seat on Merikarvia municipal council, a town which is about 50km north of Pori on Finland's west coast.
The Centre Party received almost 50 percent of the town's votes in the municipal election, meaning all of its candidates were elected to the council.
"In the evening, I felt annoyed. I was really disappointed. I was already asleep when my son called and told me that I had been elected to the council," Koivutalo said.
Her husband will also sit on the same council, having secured 26 votes in the election.
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