The Swedish Election Authority now estimates that at most 500 voters are affected by early ballots that probably cannot be identified. The earlier estimate was around 4,000. The September 7 assessment remains preliminary, and the number may fall as the analysis continues.
What happened?
Following its weekend review, the authority has distinguished between different causes of duplicate registrations. The initial figure of around 4,000 was based on the number of registered duplicates. It did not mean that the same number of ballots had been confirmed impossible to count.
The remaining group concerns ballots incorrectly assigned another voter’s electoral roll number. The authority says this happened when staff began receiving a new vote before completing the previous voter’s transaction. The ballots were therefore registered incorrectly. For voters who cannot be identified, the early ballots cannot be counted, according to the agency’s current analysis.
Location
Sverige
Impact and significance
The practical question is whether someone voted at an affected location at an affected time. The Election Authority will publish a list of those places and times on val.se. It cannot contact the affected people directly because their identity is precisely what cannot be established.
If both the location and time match the forthcoming list, the authority urges the voter to vote again at their assigned polling station on election day. The advice is not to cast another early ballot. Anyone who did not vote at the specified places during the specified times is not affected by this particular error.
Background
Other duplicates have different explanations. Some people genuinely voted early more than once. In those cases, all their early ballots are rejected, the authority says. In other cases, election staff replaced a damaged envelope with a new one. The discarded empty envelopes can be separated out without affecting the voter’s ballot. These two situations should therefore not be confused with ballots assigned an incorrect electoral roll number.
Latest update
In the September 7 statement, the investigation was not yet complete and the list of affected locations and times had not been presented. The next important update is that specific list on val.se. The figure of 500 is an upper limit in the ongoing analysis, not a final account of how many voters will need to act.
Sources
Related analysis
Reviewed: 2026-09-07. Independent editorial content. WUA Sverige is not affiliated with any political party.