The Left Party agrees with Mohamed Abdukardir Ali on "timeout"

The Left Party announced on Tuesday that the leadership has agreed with V candidate Mohamed Abdukardir Ali that he should take a "timeout". Ali shall not serve as a Member of Parliament "from the beginning of the term".

This after the National Anti-Corruption Unit investigates "improper activity during voting". According to the investigation, in which the V candidate appears, people must have been driven to the polling station with pre-crossed ballots. Payments are also mentioned among the data. He himself denies any involvement.

There is no such thing as a "timeout" for a member of the Riksdag according to the assembly's rules, and a substitute cannot step in automatically, political scientist and Timbro publisher Andreas Johansson Heinö points out for Expressen. It is likely that the Left Party will begin the term with one member less, which would change the mandate position between the blocs to 175 versus 173.

But if Mohamed Abdukardir Ali wants his seat in the Riksdag, the Left Party cannot stop him.

- The parliamentary mandates are personal, says Joakim Nergelius, professor of constitutional law at Örebro University.

A court can, however, remove a parliamentary mandate if the member in question is convicted of a crime. But then the deed must have been serious.

- Vote fraud is of course not a trivial crime, you tend to look at such things quite seriously, says Joakim Nergelius,

But the outcome depends entirely on who is guilty of vote influence. If Abdukardir Ali himself has not done anything criminal but someone else close to him is convicted, it is not certain that it will affect the V candidate.

- I don't think so, that process is completely connected to this person being sentenced for the crime. If you come to the conclusion that it is a friend of his who wanted to help him, then he himself is not to blame.

How the case will end is difficult to predict, says Nergelius. There is, as far as he knows, no historical example.

- I am not aware of a similar case. There are similar reports every year, but this is different because it concerns a person who has been elected to the Riksdag.

Another theoretical possibility is that there will be a re-election. This could happen if the election result is appealed to the Election Review Board - which anyone with the right to vote in this context can do within ten days of the election result being determined - and if the authority's investigation then concludes that the election must be redone in the electoral district or constituency.

Emma Hellman, head of office at the Election Review Board, says that a local re-election in Borlänge could theoretically lead to a different distribution of mandates in the parliamentary election, but a lot needs to be done before that.

- We still haven't gotten so far in the processing that we even have a sensitivity analysis from the Swedish Electoral Authority, and we need that to be able to see the differences. So how many votes had been needed for the distribution of mandates to be changed and perhaps also how many votes had been required for another person to have entered the personal election, says Hellman.

On Tuesday, the authority had received around 2,200 appeals, and a rough estimate is that a large number relate to Borlänge - the board received a total of 406 appeals of the election results in 2022 and 723 in 2018.

- To calm the public's worries, it should be said that all appeals will be handled. The number does not determine whether there is an error or not, says Emma Hellman.

On social media, the link to the Election Review Board's form is being spread along with calls to appeal the election. Several influential accounts have published the link, other accounts have systematically responded to posts about the events in Borlänge with instructions to appeal. Some accounts also speculate on how a re-election could have benefited the Tidö parties if voters would then reason differently.

Emma Hellman also points out that re-election is not the only measure that the Electoral Review Board can decide on.

- You always take the least intrusive correction, sometimes a recount of votes is enough, but it is not possible to say at this point if it is even possible, provided that what is said in the media is true. Not until the trial itself takes place will you know if it would have any impact.