Election watch
Latvia 2026 Saeima Election
Held on the first Saturday of October under the Saeima Election Law, electing all 100 members.
Latvia votes for the 15th Saeima having legislated a change in how the ballots are counted: the parliament approved a move to manual counting for this election. That makes the count itself the thing to watch — not because manual counting is worse, but because any change to the counting method in the cycle before a vote is a change to the safeguards a result rests on.
What to watch
Each point is classified under the same five categories as a documented finding, so an upcoming election reads with the same frame as a past one.
- Process violations
How the move to manual vote counting performs in practice: whether results are delivered on the expected timetable, and whether discrepancies between polling-station protocols and aggregated totals are published rather than merely resolved.
- Information operations
Whether Russian-language information operations target the sizeable Russian-speaking electorate, and whether claims about the count's integrity are amplified from outside the country.
See the source - Foreign interference
Whether the Doppelganger network, documented cloning European outlets and sanctioned by the EU, extends to Latvian-language or Latvian-branded properties in this cycle.
See the source - Information operations
Documented country-targeting precedent, not evidence of activity in Latvia's 2026 campaign: Portal Kombat maintained Latvia-targeted infrastructure within its 224-portal network. Watch for automated republication, localised domains and search manipulation.
See the source
Precedent, not prediction
Documented past → this vote
Each is a past, documented case linked to this vote as precedent — not a claim that it is active here. Watch for reuse of the technique, not the name.
Documented past
Russia · Social Design Agency; Structura · 2022 – ongoing
Doppelganger / RRN
ConfirmedA Russia-origin information-manipulation operation that clones the websites of legitimate European and North American media and government bodies to spread pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukraine content, attributed to the Russian firms Social Design Agency and Structura and targeted by EU and US sanctions and domain seizures.
Watch for reuse
Documented past
Russia · TigerWeb and an unidentified commissioning operator · 2013 – ongoing
Portal Kombat
ConfirmedA structured network of country- and locality-targeted portals that mass-republishes Russian and pro-Russian sources. VIGINUM expanded its inventory from 193 to 224 portals in early 2024, covering almost every EU member state and additional European audiences shortly before the European Parliament election.
Watch for reuse
Previously documented in this country
Actors documented in this region
Background reading
Explore
Sources cited above
Where the date comes from
- Elections of the Saeima — Saeima of the Republic of Latvia
- Polling stations for the 2026 Saeima election — Central Election Commission of Latvia
Scheduled dates come from national election authorities and are linked above. Dates can move; where one is not yet fixed by decree it is marked as expected rather than confirmed. Listing an election here is not a prediction that anything improper will occur — it is a statement about what would be worth checking if it did.