Technical Error Affects Advance Voting – Thousands of Voters Impacted

Around 4,000 voters may have been incorrectly registered in connection with advance voting. The Election Authority has overnight stopped the technical error that caused the discrepancies.

The Election Authority reports that a technical error in the authority’s IT system has affected the registration of received advance votes. The error was discovered on Thursday and is said to have meant that around 4,000 voters were either checked off twice or had their vote registered to another voter.

About 1.4 million voters have so far voted in advance in this year’s election. The error has been general and is reported to have affected polling stations in almost every municipality.

During the night, the Election Authority together with its IT provider, the Swedish Tax Agency, implemented a solution that is said to have stopped the problem. The authority states that the error should now not be able to occur again and that voter registration is functioning correctly on Friday.

Meanwhile, a comprehensive analysis is underway to identify which voters may have been affected. Anna Nyqvist, the Election Authority’s chief administrative officer, describes the incident as serious and says that the authority is working to minimize the impact on the election results.

– The incident is serious, and we are now working together with our IT provider, the Swedish Tax Agency, to minimize the consequences for the election result. We understand that there may be concern among individual voters who have voted in advance. We are working to identify as many as possible of the affected voters. The analysis is being carried out with great care and needs to take some time, says Anna Nyqvist.

No External Influence

The Election Authority assesses that it will likely be able to identify some of the roughly 4,000 affected voters. For votes where the voter cannot be identified, however, the vote will be disqualified.

The authority also states that there are no indications that the error was caused by any external actor or interference. According to the current assessment, it is a technical error in the Election Authority’s own IT system.

Advance voting for the parliamentary, regional, and municipal elections continues until election day on September 13.