Update: The Swedish Election Authority has reduced the number of early votes potentially affected by the technical error from around 4,000 to no more than 500. The final figure could fall further. The authority will publish the locations and times of the affected voting sessions, so people who may have been involved can vote again at their polling station on 13 September.
Sweden’s early voting system was affected by a technical error that may have involved up to 4,000 voters, just over a week before the country’s general election on 13 September. The Swedish Election Authority (Valmyndigheten) said the problem caused some voters to be registered twice and others’ votes to be associated with the wrong person. The fault has been fixed and there are no indications of external interference.
The problem was discovered on 3 September and corrected overnight. According to the Swedish Election Authority, voting resumed normally on the morning of 4 September after an updated version of its IT system was deployed.
Around 1.4 million people had already voted early by the time the error was identified. Sweden’s parliamentary, regional and municipal elections will take place on 13 September 2026, while early voting has been open since 26 August. Swedish Election Authority’s 2026 election information
How the Sweden early voting error occurred
The Election Authority has provided more detail on how the malfunction worked. In some cases, an early vote was registered using the electoral roll number of the person whose vote had been processed immediately before it.
This meant that the first voter could appear to have voted twice, while the second voter’s ballot was not correctly registered. The problem occurred at voting locations in almost all Swedish municipalities, rather than in one specific part of the country.
The authority described the figure of 4,000 as a maximum. It is now analysing the registrations in an attempt to identify the voters affected and expects the final number to be lower.
The Election Authority said the cause was a technical fault in its own IT system and that there were no signs of an external cause or interference. It is working with its IT supplier, the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket), to reconstruct the affected registrations and limit the consequences.
Votes belonging to people who can be identified may therefore be recovered correctly. Votes whose voters cannot ultimately be identified will have to be rejected.
Voters have been warned not to vote early again
The incident has also created uncertainty among people who have already cast an early ballot. The Election Authority has specifically warned them not to submit a second early vote.
Under Swedish electoral rules, if a person votes early more than once, all of those early votes are invalidated. Anna Nyqvist, head of the Election Authority’s office, told TV4 that casting another early ballot was therefore not a solution for voters concerned that their first vote might have been affected.
There is, however, an important distinction. According to the Election Authority’s guidance for voters affected by the error, a person who has already voted early may still vote at their assigned polling station on election day. The vote cast at the polling station on 13 September will then take precedence over the earlier ballot.
The authority has not yet said whether it will contact individual voters whose registrations are found to have been affected. It has said that further information will be published as the analysis progresses.
The error comes one week before Sweden’s election
The technical problem occurred during the final stage of a closely watched election campaign and affects one of the administrative processes on which the credibility of the vote depends.
For now, there is no evidence that the malfunction was deliberate or that it will affect the counting procedure itself. The Election Authority says the vote count will proceed as normal, while its investigation focuses on identifying incorrectly registered early ballots before the election.
The scale of the potential problem also remains limited compared with the 1.4 million early voters recorded by 3 September. But with voting continuing until election day, the priority for the authority is now to establish how many of the maximum 4,000 cases can be corrected and how many ballots, if any, will ultimately have to be rejected.
The episode places additional attention on the reliability of Sweden’s electoral infrastructure at a sensitive point in the campaign. How quickly the authority can identify the affected voters will determine the practical impact of the error, as well as its consequences for public confidence ahead of the 13 September election.
