Voting in Switzerland (called votation) is the process by which Swiss citizens make decisions about governance and elect officials. The history of voting rights in Switzerland mirrors the complexity of the nation itself. The polling stations are opened on Saturdays and Sunday mornings but most people vote by post in advance. At noon on Sunday (Abstimmungssonntag in German, Dimanche de votation in French), voting ends and the results are usually known during the afternoon.
Switzerland's voting system is unique among modern democratic nations in that Switzerland practices direct democracy in parallel with representative democracy, which is why the Swiss system is known as a semi-direct democracy. Direct democracy allows any citizen to challenge any law approved by the parliament or, at any time, propose a modification of the federal Constitution. In addition, in most cantons all votes are cast using paper ballots that are manually counted. At the federal level, voting can be organised for:
Elections (election of the Federal Assembly)
Mandatory referendums (votation on a modification of the constitution made by the Federal Assembly)
Optional referendums (referendum on a law accepted by the Federal Assembly and that collected 50,000 signatures of opponents)
Federal popular initiatives (votation on a modification of the constitution made by citizens and that collected 100,000 signatures of supporters)
Approximately four times a year, voting occurs over various issues; these include both initiatives and referendums, where policies are directly voted on by people, and elections, where the populace votes for officials. Federal, cantonal and municipal issues are polled simultaneously, and a majority of votes are cast by mail. Between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times, to answer 103 federal questions, besides many more cantonal and municipal questions (during the same period, French citizens participated in only two referendums).
The most frequent themes are social issues (e.g.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
A decentralized system is one that works when no single party is in charge or fully trusted. This course teaches decentralized systems principles while guiding students through the engineering of thei
The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (Bundesgericht, Tribunal fédéral, Tribunale federale, ) is the supreme court of the Swiss Confederation and at the head of the Swiss judiciary. The Federal Supreme Court is headquartered in the Federal Courthouse in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud. The two social security divisions of the Federal Supreme Court (formerly Federal Insurance Court, as an organizationally independent unit of the Federal Supreme Court), are located in Lucerne.
The Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation (SR 10; Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (BV); Constitution fédérale de la Confédération suisse (Cst.); Costituzione federale della Confederazione Svizzera (Cost.); ) of 18 April 1999 (SR 101) is the third and current federal constitution of Switzerland. It establishes the Swiss Confederation as a federal republic of 26 cantons (states).
In Switzerland, a popular initiative (German: Volksinitiative, French: Initiative populaire, Italian: Iniziativa popolare, Romansh: Iniziativa dal pievel) allows the people to suggest law on a national, cantonal, and municipal level. On a federal level it may only change the federal constitution, not propose an ordinary law. Along with the popular referendum and in some cantons recall elections, it is a form of direct democracy. Popular initiatives were introduced as a tool at the federal level in the 1891 partial revision of the Swiss Federal Constitution.
Explores the security and verifiability of digital voting systems, including in-person and remote e-voting, focusing on protection against tampering and ballot counting efficiency.
Switzerland is one of the few countries globally that has a national program for electronic voting (E-voting), which has been evolving in several stages for well over a decade. For the past several years, the program’s most recent stage has focused on intr ...
2022
Préoccupées par l’intérêt des jeunes pour la vie publique et la politique, les autorités des régimes démocratiques tentent d’agir sur la citoyenneté des jeunes. En Suisse, où la démocratie directe repose en premier lieu sur l’engagement citoyen au niveau d ...
Antipodes2022
The essay investigates the intellectual production developed by Italian refugees hosted in the military internment camp opened in Lausanne in January 1944 and active until the spring of 1945, when the refuges returned to Italy. In the complex and controver ...