Latvia 2022 Parliamentary Election

ODIHR found the absence of a legal provision for observers at odds with OSCE commitments, although the authorities gave the mission full access in practice and the commission accredited 115 citizen observers, 32 national observers from two national institutions and 64 international observers from 16 countries. The law bars independent candidates and bars lists from parties registered less than a year before the vote, both of which ODIHR made priority recommendations to change. It also retains a bar on standing based on previous political activities; ODIHR records that the European Court of Human Rights, in its 2006 Zdanoka v. Latvia judgment, urged the Latvian parliament to set a time limit on that restriction and to keep it under review with a view to bringing it to an early end, and that the restriction remains in place.

The audit, a financial audit of the commission's 2021 accounts announced on 4 July 2022, found that the commission's administrative and support functions rested on 12 staff, creating bottlenecks in budget planning, procurement and contract management, and that sourcing all election system modules from a single supplier, SIA SOAAR, deepened rather than reduced dependency; the Saeima election module's cost rose from a planned EUR 363,000 to EUR 1.16 million. On the system itself the auditors found that the acceptance testing the contracts required of the commission was neither carried out nor documented by it, that the only acceptance-test protocol they could identify had been produced by the developer and covered postal-voting functionality alone, and that the developer's monitoring reports listed more than a thousand errors found in the system, which in the auditors' view showed the acceptance testing had not been complete. The auditors warned that leaving legally driven changes late risks contracting and development work that conforms to neither good governance, nor IT-development good practice, nor appropriate security principles. These findings concern the system as built for the June 2021 municipal elections and its maintenance contracts; they are not a test of the 2022 count, and they entered the record of these elections through the complainant's submission reproduced in the commission's Decision No. 97. ODIHR separately made commission capacity, including the IT department, its first priority recommendation.

By 30 September 2022 the National Electronic Mass Media Council had restricted 132 television channels and 226 internet sites, covering all available Russian-registered channels and sites and several from Belarus, after amendments adopted on 10 March and 26 May 2022 authorised suspension without a court order on grounds of false information or threats to national security. ODIHR reports that while several interlocutors appreciated the national security context, they raised concerns that the amendments were adopted in a rushed and non-transparent process without sufficient public consultation and that suspensions not requiring a court order could create an unfortunate legal precedent. Safeguarding freedom of expression and the right of voters to receive reliable information in minority languages was among ODIHR's priority recommendations. Six of the 19 lists campaigned exclusively in Latvian.

In its 2022 annual report the service says it took preventive measures against the Latvian Russian Union during the year, issuing the party an official warning not to engage in activities threatening national security before amendments to the Law on Political Parties took effect on 22 June 2022, and giving individual warnings to its leaders in early 2022 about criminal liability for assisting a foreign state in actions against Latvia; it notes that the party's protests were partly integrated into its election campaign. The same report says that after For Stability! won the votes of what the service calls the pro-Kremlin electorate in these elections and, on the service's account, showed actions in support of Russia, it preventively warned the party and its officials under those amendments not to support Russia. The report also records that in 2022 Vladimir Putin ordered that the Alexander Pushkin medal be given to Tatjana Favorska, a board member of the Society of Russians in Latvia and a Latvian Russian Union candidate in these elections. What is documented here is the issuing of the warnings and the ordering of the decoration; the same report states that the service established no attempt by any foreign state to influence the outcome.

The Force of People's Power filed 38 complaints on 5 October 2022, identical apart from the station numbers, against the approval of counting protocols in 80 Riga polling stations (Nos. 1000 to 1080, excluding No. 1006), alleging that protocol decisions were not published or notified, that the IT system gave it no access to them and that technical failures had occurred; it also contested results in 70 out-of-country polling stations on IT-malfunction grounds. Three Harmony candidates asked for results in all polling stations to be annulled and all their party's votes recounted. The commission treated these as four complaints contesting the result and dismissed all of them on 10 October 2022 for lack of supporting evidence and irrelevance to the result, holding under the Senate's SA-5/2006 standard that a breach voids a result only where the result no longer reflects the voters' free will. The Senate rejected the Force of People's Power appeal on 19 October 2022 in case SA-2/2022, and one Harmony candidate's appeal was also rejected. ODIHR separately records that penetration and stress tests were carried out on the electronic systems, that scenario-based testing took place a week before the vote, and that its interlocutors expressed a high level of confidence in the integrity of the electoral infrastructure.

The State Security Service said two days after the vote that it had detected no attempt by hostile foreign states to influence the elections, and that of about 70 reports of possible violations fewer than 30 fell within its competence and none were confirmed. Its 2022 annual report repeats that the elections were held without any attempt by foreign states to influence the outcome and that its analysis of the information space did not indicate any real attempts by Russia to influence them; it opened no criminal case for unlawful influencing of voters or tampering with results. The same report notes that in several cases messages from certain groups and parties made unjustified claims doubting election security or repeated claims made by states hostile to Latvia. ODIHR interlocutors who had expected significant disinformation campaigns or interference attempts said none materialised that would have affected the electoral process.

Nineteen lists with 1,829 candidates were registered and ODIHR recorded broad trust in the impartiality and inclusiveness of the process; no complaint was filed against any candidate registration decision. Only three applicants were disqualified, for a prior intentional criminal offence. For Stability! won 11 seats, while Harmony took 4.81 per cent, Latvian Russian Union 3.63 per cent and Sovereign Power 3.24 per cent and none reached the threshold. Separately, ODIHR found that 191,036 residents holding Latvian non-citizen passports, around 9 per cent of the resident population and mainly people identifying as belonging to national minorities, were not entitled to vote at all.

Parliament amended the election law on 26 March 2026 to require fully manual counting, replacing the previously envisaged use of ballot scanners. ODIHR records the trigger as the June 2025 municipal elections, when automated ballot-scanning and vote-counting technology was deployed nationwide for the first time and suffered major failures, forcing reversion to manual counting in numerous polling stations, delaying results and leading to the resignation of the responsible minister and of the commission chairperson; the amendments followed procurement concerns referenced by the European Public Prosecutor's Office and a public call by President Rinkēvičs. No published audit or ruling attributes an error to the scanner-assisted count used in 2022, and equally none independently verified it.