After years of politics and horse-trading, Finland is getting a new administrative level consisting of “wellbeing services counties”.

Previously municipalities have been responsible for organising health, social and rescue services, but now this responsibility will go to the counties. Key decisions are made by a county council, which is elected by the residents of the county.

The first ever county elections will be conducted on January 23rd 2022 and for a long time I was so sceptical about this entire reform that I was planning on not voting at all. This was mainly due to my frustration of the entire process that led to the reform, but I have also always suspected that the reform will just result in increased bureaucracy.

But here we are, the counties will be established and councils will be elected, and there’s not much to be done about it right now. Except to vote. Because let’s face it, if you live in a representative democracy and you’re handed the right (but not obligation) to vote, it would be arrogant, lazy, and stupid not to vote.

The only reason for not voting, in my opinion, would be if you intend to make a public statement of your decision. In this case, for example, I originally thought that okay, I will not vote and instead I’m going to cry out on Twitter and Facebook that this entire reform is crap and everybody should protest by not voting.

Having considered how ridiculous and non-effective that course of action would have been, I decided to ditch the idea, which basically means that there’s only one thing left for me to do: to vote.

The media is speculating that voting activity will be very low in these elections. How low? Well, for sure much lower than the activity we had in the 2021 municipality elections (55,1%), which already caused a lot of distress and headache.

I will be surprised if even 1/3 of the voters show up in these elections. But let’s wait and see and discuss that problem separately when we have the results at hand.