Disinformation & election interference

Assessment

Sweden's Sept 13 election remained unresolved on Sept 15, with roughly 95 percent of districts counted giving the centre-left bloc 176 Riksdag seats against 173 for Prime Minister Kristersson's camp, close to 300,000 advance and overseas ballots due to be counted from Sept 16 and the final result reportedly pushed back a day to Sept 17, leaving an extended window in which fraud narratives can run against an open count. Five further votes fall inside eleven weeks: Russia's Duma on Sept 18-20, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on Sept 20, Brazil on Oct 4, Israel on Oct 27 and the United States on Nov 3. Sweden's Psychological Defence Agency has detailed a partly AI-powered network of about 1,200 fake X accounts, named Holiday, behind more than 50,000 posts, comments and shares across 2025 and 2026, and ISD counted 269 Matryoshka posts between Jun 24 and Sept 1 against German federal, regional and local candidates. Moscow has inverted the frame, with the SVR alleging on Aug 31 that the EU plans polling-station provocations and cyberattacks on Russian election infrastructure and Lavrov claiming on Sept 8 that the EU is training secret monitors for the Duma vote, which the OSCE has again not been invited to observe.