In Berlin, the election officer has the state election results judged in two constituencies because there were errors in the vote. Some parties want new elections right across the city. Is this realistic?
In it Spandick
“If that happened in an African country or Russia, everyone would be outraged,” says Patrick Sensburg. The chairman of the Bundestag electoral review committee is upset. “It cannot be that mistakes like this happen in the central political act of this country and that we then pretend everything is okay.”
What he means? On election Sunday almost three weeks ago, there were massive breakdowns in Berlin. In some polling stations there were too few ballots, in others the wrong ones. In some cases, minors are said to have received documents for the Bundestag election. And in front of some urns the queues were so long that people could only vote hours after the first projections were published.
The Berliners voted on a lot this Sunday. Among other things, through the House of Representatives, the Berlin state parliament. For this purpose, the state election officer Petra Michaelis published the official election results on Thursday. It is her last day at work; she will step down from office on Friday. Because of those problems on election day.
AfD, Die Basis and The Party lodge a complaint
Now the result has to be published in the so-called official gazette, then legal action can be taken because of all these errors. You can complain to the Berlin Constitutional Court. Michaelis himself can also file such complaints if she doubts the validity of the election. It does this in two cases: in constituency 6, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district, and in constituency 1, Marzahn-Hellersdorf district. At the same time, she announced that problems had occurred in 207 of 2,257 polling stations. Then why does she only file a complaint in two cases?
Whether an election is repeated depends on the question of the relevance of the mandate: Could the errors have an impact on the distribution of seats in parliament? In the two districts in which the election officer files a complaint, the gap between first and second place after first votes is very small. In Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, a recount has actually changed who wins the direct mandate.
But not only the election officer herself can file a complaint, candidates can also do so. This is how the AfD, the Free Voters and The Party, among others, are planning. The fun party becomes really state-supporting on the topic. “Voting is the most important act of citizen participation and should be taken seriously in a democracy,” writes the party on a website where it calls on people to register their complaints.
“We want to implement new elections all over Berlin,” says Marie Geissler, the party leader in Berlin. “If there have been such obvious mistakes, you have to complain.” To do this, people should send their complaints to the regional association, and a lawyer will prepare the lawsuit. She herself heard of people who were supposed to vote on ballot papers for other constituencies or polling stations where chairs were converted into booths because there were too few. Some told her that in her pub no votes were counted to the party they had voted for themselves. These are narratives that are not easy and, in some cases, cannot be checked at all. That also makes challenging the results so difficult.
So far only one complaint has been successful
Sophie Schönberger also doubts that the complaints will be successful. The professor of public law at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf suspects that there is a lack of opportunities to demonstrate the relevance of the mandate. “The fact that there are electoral errors here is relatively obvious and I understand why that’s a problem politically,” she says, “but that’s not enough legally.”
So far there has only been one case in which such a complaint was successful. That was in Hamburg in the early 1990s. Two years after the general election, the President of the Hamburg Constitutional Court ruled that it was invalid. The state parliament had to be dissolved, there were new elections. At that time there had been problems in drawing up the CDU’s state list.
In contrast to the House of Representatives election, complaints about the Bundestag election are not submitted directly to the Constitutional Court, but first to the Bundestag. After almost three weeks, 246 objections have now been received (as of October 14, 21). According to a spokeswoman, a large part of it comes from Berlin. For comparison: In the total period of two months, 275 objections were received in the last federal election.
New elections unlikely
Despite the many complaints, it is unlikely that the Bundestag election will be repeated because of the errors in individual constituencies. The proportion of those entitled to vote who could not vote properly in Berlin is smaller because it is compared to the number of voters in the whole of Germany. It is even more difficult here to plausibly demonstrate the relevance of the mandate. Sensburg doesn’t think that’s impossible either: “In Berlin there are around 2.4 million eligible voters, over three times as many as in the whole of Saarland.”
For Geissler, the Berlin chairwoman of the party, the most important thing is not whether the complaint is successful or not. “We do what has to be done.” The action is intended to draw attention to the problems that existed in the election in Berlin. The counter on the complaint page is now 265.
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