At one polling station, over 100 Eritrean women showed up accompanied by two religious leaders, who instructed the women on how to vote.
Sweden’s recent election may reveal a growing tolerance for questionable voting practices.
O n September 13, Swedes went to the polls to elect a new Riksdag, their unicameral parliament. The right-wing coalition government, supported by the national-conservative Sweden Democrats, narrowly lost the election by 0.7 percent — exactly its margin of victory in 2022. The biggest story coming out of the election, however, is an ever-growing list of allegations of electoral fraud that may trigger a revote.
First, some background: Sweden uses proportional representation. Unlike in the U.S., where each constituency elects a single member, Swedish constituencies elect several. In each constituency, each party runs a list of candidates determined by a nominating committee; the higher a candidate ranks on that list, the higher the esteem in which the party usually holds the candidate. But this party ranking is not the only thing that matters; on a Swedish ballot, voters can vote for a party, but they can also check the box next to an individual candidate they wish to vote for. If the party gets one seat, normally only the candidate topping the list is elected. Most candidates are ranked too low to have a realistic chance of winning office.
There is, however, an interesting wrinkle. A lower-ranked candidate can be elected if they receive more votes than the higher-ranked candidates and have received at least 5 percent of their party’s total votes in their constituency. Due to the second requirement, as well as less than 25 percent of voters even bothering to cast a personal vote, few MPs — eight this year — are elected “out of turn.”
Out of those eight, three were immigrants: two from Somalia and one from Iraq. Prior to the election, police quietly began an investigation into one of them: Mohamed Abdukardir Ali, elected on the Left Party ticket in Dalarna County. Ali is accused of giving (Somali) voters pre-marked ballots with his box already checked. Photos allegedly show an Ali or his associates handing out cash with ballots and driving voters to the polling stations (while that’s common in America, it’s taboo in Sweden). The police were tipped off after a person reported seeing drug addicts bribed with pizza.
Ali himself is an odd case: He became a Swedish citizen only seven months before the election, after having had his previous application denied in 2024. He is currently under court-supervised debt relief — a Swedish version of personal bankruptcy — with all but a subsistence allowance of his wages legally garnished to pay his debtors. However, since he is unemployed, he earns no wages, instead collecting welfare at the poverty line.
In addition to his Somali clan, his debtors may be the only ones happy about Ali’s election. His local Left Party chapter certainly isn’t. In interviews, none of the chapter members seem to know who he is or how he ended up on their ballot. It appears Ali showed up, insisted on getting a spot, and received what the leadership deemed to be an unelectable spot near the bottom of the list (possibly to add some diversity, as the rest of the ballot was made up of ethnic Swedes). While Swedish electoral law is in some ways stringent, for example, generally requiring voter ID, a loophole means that even if Ali is found guilty of electoral fraud, he cannot be forced to leave office.
Since the announcement of the Ali investigation, cases of fraud have been reported elsewhere in the country, most of them in Sweden’s “alienated areas” — areas characterized by high levels of crime, unemployment, and majority-minority demographics. At one polling station in Stockholm, over 100 Eritrean women showed up accompanied by two religious leaders, who instructed the women on how to vote and ensured they all voted for the same party and candidate.
At another polling station, large groups of voters who did not speak Swedish had all memorized the same phrase (requesting instructions on how to vote for candidate #8, their countryman). At several polling stations, staff have had to expel people looking to “help” others vote — including one person employed by the Left Party.
It is not a coincidence that most incidents involve the Left Party, a party that has long had a dubious grasp on democracy. It was founded in 1917 as a breakaway faction from the larger Social Democratic Party after the latter dared to condemn the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and disown political violence in general. For decades, the party was funded by the Soviet Union.
That is not to say that other parties are immune from such shady behavior. While crime and unemployment may be the two issues most people associate with lax border control, in Sweden, there are early signs that some of the very institutions of government are beginning to fail.
In 2023, in the majority-minority municipality of Botkyrka, Stockholm County, the Social Democrat mayor Ebba Östlin was deposed by her own party, mere months after leading her party to reelection. The revolt happened over Östlin shutting down several youth centers that had become hotbeds for drugs and gang recruitment. At the next meeting, hordes of new members with ties to organized crime showed up and voted no confidence in her leadership. Since mayors in Sweden are not directly elected, she was forced to step down.
Despite overwhelming evidence and months of media outcry, the Social Democrats refused to intervene or even recognize that something untoward had happened. Party membership is low and in long-term decline, making parties susceptible to entryism. No legislation exists to prevent this kind of coup. And once criminal gangs can take over local governments, a country is not far from being a failed state. Just look at Mexico, where hardly any government in the northernmost part of the country rules without cartel consent.
Sweden’s welfare state has also found itself under attack. A joint-agency review found that employees at all 62 of the largest private disability caregiver firms in Sweden (who are publicly funded) had ties to organized crime. Private job coaches, paid by the Swedish Public Employment Agency, have also been infiltrated by gangs who use them to give their own people subsidized employment. Meanwhile, at least one publicly funded independent school employed ISIS veterans, and ISIS veterans also found public employment working with refugee teens, as social secretaries, youth leaders, and preschool teachers. Due to another gap in Swedish legislation, joining ISIS was technically not illegal at the time.
While this and the other legislative gaps may seem to be a case of extreme naïveté, they also reflect the kind of society Sweden used to be: a society that never had to deal with electoral fraud, organized crime, or jihadists.
Sweden’s saving grace may ironically be its weak constitution: Unlike in America, where local government is protected by the Constitution, the Swedish constitution offers no such protections. Also unlike in America, the Swedish Supreme Court is not a constitutional court, meaning the constitution is not actually enforceable. In practice, this renders it nothing more than a piece of paper. Nothing stops a Swedish government from doing a massive clean-up of the civil service, or from dissolving local government altogether in co-opted municipalities like Botkyrka.
Yet the right, except for the Sweden Democrats, proved itself hesitant to carry out this kind of systemic reform. On most counts, the government did an excellent job and arguably deserved reelection: Asylum migration is at a 40-year low, on track to be reduced by 75 percent this year compared to 2022. Shootings are also down 80 percent, and Sweden now has the lowest inflation in the EU, while economic growth is easily outpacing the EU average. However, the lack of systemic reform meant left-wing municipalities could successfully fight government policies (such as on voluntary repatriation), while the civil service slow-walked policy implementation and frequently engaged in malicious compliance. These constant battles consumed much of the media’s attention and quickly led to most voters coming to view the government as dysfunctional.
The allegations of electoral fraud have cast a shadow over the left’s narrow victory. On the right, many are now hoping and praying for a revote in the affected counties, which is legally possible and not unprecedented in Sweden.
More than anything else, the allegations surrounding this election suggest that Sweden’s electoral safeguards have not kept pace with the country’s transformation.