Sweden 2026 Parliamentary Election

After the election-night count, the municipal election committees counted on 16 September the advance and overseas votes that had not reached polling stations in time, which the Election Authority had estimated beforehand at close to 300,000. That count moved one seat from the Social Democrats to the Left Party compared with election night. The county administrative boards then examined and checked every vote again, including the votes for all registered parties and the personal votes. The final count, completed on 19 September, produced the same seat total for every party as the preliminary result published on 17 September, and the preliminary turnout of 84.8 per cent became 84.89 per cent.

The Election Authority states that an error discovered at the beginning of September affected the registration of certain advance votes, that it corrected the error, and that all advance votes have been registered correctly since the morning of 4 September. It first feared that 4,000 voters were affected; after analysis it put the number at no more than 300. Saying it could not identify the individuals, it published on 11 September a list of the advance-voting premises and times concerned, covering voters in 50 municipalities, with 13 more still under investigation and 227 cleared, and recommended that anyone who had voted there at those times vote again at their own polling station on election day, warning that voting in advance a second time would invalidate all of a voter's advance votes. It stated that the count itself was not affected. The 2026 elections were the first at which advance votes were recorded in a digital voter list by scanning a code on each envelope, in place of paper checklists; the Authority's statements cited here do not identify the technical cause of the error.

Simrishamn municipality states that its staff sealed the boxes of advance ballots and kept them in a secure archive but missed one during the count of late-arriving advance votes on 16 September; the box was taken to the county administrative board once the mistake was discovered, too late for the votes to be added. The chair of the municipal election committee called it an unfortunate human error and apologised. SVT reports 121 advance votes in all, 117 valid and four invalid, and quotes the Skåne county administrative board's head of legal affairs as saying that the votes probably have no significance for the Riksdag or regional result but could affect the distribution of seats on the municipal council, and that whether a new election is needed is for the Election Review Board to decide. SVT also reports that 70 to 80 advance votes were lost in Tomelilla.

The Psychological Defence Agency (MPF) reports that the network, which it named Holiday, began in spring 2025 as some 200 accounts, about 60 of which posed as Swedish users with AI-generated profile pictures, Swedish-sounding names and manipulated location data, and took opposing sides on new proposals from the government and the opposition on migration, the economy and the climate. After a pause at the end of 2025 it returned with about 1,200 accounts, active around the clock, engaging real users, including large Swedish accounts, and joining pile-ons against Swedish politicians, public agencies, companies and media outlets. In all it made more than 50,000 posts, replies and shares. The first accounts were spotted by the Riksbank after an exercise led by MPF; MPF and the Post and Telecom Authority alerted X, which suspended every account for breaching its rules on coordinated inauthentic behaviour. MPF did not describe the network as targeting the election campaign, and it was taken down before polling day.

According to documents from the Swedish Prosecution Authority reported by SVT, police surveillance prompted by an anonymous tip was presented to the National Anti-Corruption Unit on 1 September and a preliminary investigation into improper influence at voting was opened; it was closed on 8 September because of evidentiary problems and reopened on 21 September because new circumstances warranted it. Three people are listed as suspects, their identities withheld, and prosecutor Oskar Edvardsson states that no one has been notified of suspicion. A separate police report was filed on 13 September after the Dalarna county administrative board received a reported incident. SVT, citing Dagens Industri and sources quoted by Aftonbladet, reports allegations that people handed out pre-marked Riksdag ballots urging voters to mark Mohamed Abdukardir Ali, drove voters to polling premises and handed out cash. Ali, who entered the Riksdag for Dalarna on 648 personal votes and whom the Election Authority lists among eight members who would not have been elected without their personal votes, denies any involvement. The Left Party announced on 22 September that he would take a time-out and not serve from the start of the term. No finding has been made that any vote was bought or cast unlawfully.

The head of the Board's secretariat told Altinget on 22 September that close to 700 appeals had been registered and more than 1,500 submissions were awaiting registration, each able to contain up to three appeals, one for each election; the previous record was 723 appeals of the election result in 2018, and there were 406 in 2022. About 400 of the registered appeals concerned the Riksdag election. She said many had been prompted by the alleged fraud in Borlänge and most appeared to concern the same alleged irregularities, and that it is not the number of appeals that decides whether an error occurred or affected the result, but whether one actually did. Other complaints concern long queues at some polling stations, including in Umeå. TT reported on 23 September that just over 6,000 submissions had arrived, fewer than 900 of them registered. Any voter or participating party may appeal until 29 September 2026; the law sets no deadline for the Board's decisions, which are final.

Nine days before the vote the Psychological Defence Agency (MPF) assessed that no coordinated foreign information campaigns aimed at influencing the election were under way and that the election was not currently a priority target for foreign threat actors. Its standing assessment names Russia as the primary threat actor for information influence against Sweden and the main threat linked to the elections, but found the volume of influence directed at Sweden over the preceding year significantly lower than in 2022 and 2023. On 14 September MPF and the National Cyber Security Centre stated that the election had been held without major cyberattacks or coordinated information influence by a foreign power: MPF saw no extensive coordinated activity from the actors it follows in connection with the election, and the centre noted no events that affected the conduct of the elections from a cyber perspective. Both are summary assessments without published underlying data, and the agencies said their work would continue while a new government is formed.

The Psychological Defence Agency finds clear indications that the network was created by a vendor in East Asia that sells hacking, doxxing and smear-campaign services through Telegram, and states that it has evidence that a state actor ordered the network and is behind it, but that no definitive technical attribution has been made; it does not name the state. Some of the accounts had earlier been used, under other names and in other languages, in campaigns aimed at audiences in the United States, China and Taiwan, which the agency considers were probably sold by the same vendor to other customers. The agency did not connect the network's activity to the election campaign, and X had suspended its accounts before polling day.