Legislation in Sweden with record number of contestations of results

A alliance between the right and the far right lost by close, with a difference of 50,000 votes.

“ Currently, we have about 800 registered cases and another 9,000 received, but not yet registered”, indicated a representative of the Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Control in an email sent to the agency France-Presse (AFP).

The previous record of disputes dates back to the 2018 elections, when 767 resources were registered.

The legislative elections of 13 September gave the four opposition parties, led by the Social Democrats, a narrow majority of three over the right-wing alliance of the Prime Minister at the end of his term of office, Ulf Kristersson, which includes the Swedish Democrats, a far-right anti-immigration party.

The Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson was tasked by the President of Parliament to try to form a new government.

Its main challenge will be to bring together, in the same alliance, the centrists and the radical left, two groups with very distant positions.

In recent days, accusations of electoral fraud have attracted public attention after a relatively unknown representative of the Swedish Left Party, whose support is indispensable for Andersson, has obtained a seat in Parliament by obtaining an unusual number of nominal votes (votes on specific candidates).

In Sweden we vote in the parties, but voters have the opportunity to mark an option on the ballot indicating the person they prefer to see rather than represent the party in Parliament.

If no name is given, candidates are chosen from a list defined by the party.

Thanks to hundreds of personal votes, Mohamed Abdukardir Ali, from the city of Borlänge (central region), managed to win the only parliamentary seat obtained by his party in the region, despite occupying only the ninth position on the list of candidates.

The newspaper Aftonbladet reported suspicions that voting cards with Ali’s name already marked and that money would have been offered to voters.

The Swedish Attorney General announced today that she is conducting an active investigation into an “influence on the vote in Borlänge linked to the Left Party”.

However, the body stressed that no arrest has been made and that so far no one is formally suspected of committing a crime.

In a separate statement, the Swedish police reported having received 58 complaints of electoral manipulation.

The police clarified that they observed an increase in the number of complaints received after the disclosures of the Borlänge case.