Then Sweden also got an election fraud debate. Probably it was inevitable. Studies show that disinformation campaigns increase in connection with elections and that a central goal is to attack the bodies that administer elections. It is now commonplace for the election results to be questioned in democracies around the world. Often the questioning is followed by a demand for re-election.
Experts speak of a global crisis of confidence in the electoral system. It has been established that in many democracies there is a gap between how reliable a system is and how great the public's trust in the system is. Most worrying is the gap in a number of countries in South America, such as Brazil, but other countries also stand out, including Romania and Taiwan.
Not unexpectedly, the United States also belongs to these countries. Trump's lies about the 2020 presidential election have caused a majority of Republican voters to no longer trust the American electoral system. That trust is low in Brazil is a consequence of Jair Bolsonaro copying Trump's strategy after the election loss in October 2022. Even then, the lies led to riots and the storming of buildings, including the Congress building.
In Sweden, trust in the electoral system is generally high. According to a survey (Statsvestenkapli Tidsskrift, no. 4 2023) from the 2022 election campaign, a majority of Swedes completely distance themselves from the claim that there are irregularities in the vote count (54-58 percent). However, around 10 percent believe that irregularities are common. According to the researchers, mistrust correlates with a strong conspiratorial mentality, sympathies with the Sweden Democrats and use of right-wing alternative media.
No matter how reliable an election system is, incidents do occur. Some of what happens may be criminal, others are in a gray zone of carelessness and violations of norms, for example norms for how to behave outside or in a polling station. In a well-functioning democracy, the whole thing is thoroughly investigated and measures and steps are taken to remedy any weaknesses. In the meantime, politicians and opinion leaders refrain from drawing far-reaching conclusions.
What has been happening in many of the world's democracies since a decade ago is something else. Reported incidents are immediately highlighted as evidence of widespread electoral fraud. One does not wait for the events to be investigated, but quickly draws a conclusion about the system as a whole. Campaigns are launched on social media, leading opinion leaders give the message legitimacy, mistrust spreads and demands for re-election are made.
During the election season, we have seen examples of this in Sweden as well. Mathias Cederholm at Alle Fonti has documented the development of events (Magasinet Konkret, 3/10). On September 21, the police in Borlänge published a preliminary investigation into suspected impropriety during voting. Between September 20 and 28, development accelerates. Now it is no longer about an individual case in Borlänge, but suspicions are directed at Swedish-Somalis as a group. On the 21st, the SD-affiliated think tank Oikos launches the "Reelection 2026" campaign. During the same period, SvD's lead writer Peter Wennblad publishes information from anonymous vote recipients in Järva about group voting and organized influence. The whole thing explodes on social media and appeals start pouring in to the Electoral Review Board, roughly 15,000 (to be compared with 400 after the 2022 election).
At the same time, a story about Sweden as a lost country is being spread internationally in digital environments, with allegations of election fraud in focus. The Swedish Institute reports that heavy accounts in migration-critical environments with millions of followers drive traffic (SR, 3/10).
Currently, reviews of various kinds are underway. Some of these are incident reports, roughly 5,000, i.e. reports submitted by the election administration itself to the Electoral Authority, which is tasked with identifying disturbances and assessing how well the election was conducted in the country. As of this year, such reporting is mandatory, which has resulted in a sharp increase in the number. The journalist Victor Pressfeldt has built the site Valkoll where he analyzed the reports. Examples of incidents are ballots that were moved around (which, according to Pressfeldt's analysis, mainly benefited SD), campaign work at polling stations and reports on group voting. In the 21 reports that mention a party in connection with group voting, the Christian Family Party and SD are mentioned the most times. According to Pressfeldt, nothing in the reports indicates organized cheating.
Then there are the appeals that have come in to the Electoral Review Board. These are now to be investigated, among other things, the board requests opinions from the Electoral Authority. If inaccuracies are discovered that could have affected the election results, there may be a question of re-election in the relevant constituency. As far as the police investigations are concerned, most of the 110 reports have been closed, but on October 9, preliminary investigations continued in 23 cases. We therefore do not yet know whether a crime has taken place.
When allegations of electoral fraud begin to spread, they have normally been preceded by attempts to sow doubt. Trump questioned the electoral system even before the 2016 presidential election, as he expected to lose to Hilary Clinton, and in April 2020 he began spreading lies about the postal vote. In Brazil, false claims about the country's electronic voting system were spread both before the 2018 election and the 2022 election.
Before the Swedish election in 2018, electoral fraud was widely discussed on social media. SD then created a Facebook group where you could report election fraud and a thread was started on Flashback to collect stories about fraud. The message was spread that if SD does not become the largest party, it is proof that it has been cheated. Ahead of the 2022 election, things were bubbling properly. According to the Total Defense Research Institute, FOI, there was a discussion about election fraud on several of the major social media platforms. SD's Richard Jomshof claimed that the election could be decided by electoral fraud. It all calmed down when the election results were known.
This year, the election result was different. Shortly after the election, on September 17, the site Ett folk was registered where people were invited to report electoral fraud and sign a demand for re-election (which over 160,000 people did). This therefore took place before the preliminary investigation in Borlänge began. As Expo (1/10) showed, the man behind the site is an opinion leader who has spread pro-Russian and far-right narratives for several years.
That accusations of electoral fraud come precisely from populist actors is connected with the view of the will of the people which is the core of populism. People think of the will of the people as something uniform rather than as the expression of temporary majorities. Within right-wing nationalist populism, this unified popular will also assumes an ethnic dimension, as an expression of the true Swedes (or Hungarians, or Americans, etc). When the true people do not win elections, then things have not gone right.
These ideas have since been woven together with the talk of whale cattle and clan voting. The rather explicit assumption is that certain groups lack the ability to make independent decisions. That the Left Party won big in marginalized areas has been taken as income because the voters in these areas are ignorant and vote on the basis of group affiliation. As many have pointed out, there is an alternative hypothesis: that these voters had their own interests in mind when they voted.
Isn't it a problem if people in a democracy are ignorant of society and politics? Of course. Democracy presupposes fairly knowledgeable citizens, which is precisely one of the reasons why education, public education and free media are absolutely crucial. But of course this applies to all voters – both immigrants with low education and Swedish-born men who base their political beliefs on far-right propaganda on social media.
