House of Representatives elections in Berlin: Forgotten postal votes are counted publicly

In the Berlin district of Lichtenberg, the public count of the votes of 466 postal voters who were not taken into account in the repeat election on Sunday began on Wednesday morning. The letters, which had been sent by the voters in good time, were supposed to be delivered in the district shortly before the weekend – but in the end they did not arrive where the count was being taken and were therefore initially not included in the election result. This will now be made up for: The result of the current count is to be transmitted to the district election committee.

The additional votes are particularly interesting because according to the provisional results of the House of Representatives elections so far, the SPD in second place with 105 votes is only a hair’s breadth from the Greens in third place (both 18.4 percent). However, the SPD received more votes than the Greens almost everywhere in Lichtenberg – it is therefore considered unlikely that the Greens received 105 more second votes in the 466 ballot letters than the SPD.

“The fault is not with Deutsche Post, but with the post office of the district,” Lichtenberg city councilor Kevin Hönicke had tweeted about the process the day before. In the districts, the final results of the election are to be determined early next week. On February 27th, the state electoral committee meets to determine the official final result for all of Berlin.

The winner of the election, the CDU (28.2 percent), wants to meet with the Greens and the SPD on Friday for initial exploratory talks about forming a government. The SPD, the Greens and the Left Party had announced that they would also like to conduct exploratory talks about continuing their coalition.