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First Berlin had to rehold its city election after a polling-day debacle rendered the results unsound. Now it must rerun its federal election too, though only partially, Germany’s top court has ruled.
Berliners went to the polls on September 26 2021 to find a democratic system in chaos. Waiting times of an hour or more were common. Some polling stations closed early and some stayed open late. Cast ballots went missing and some ballot papers never arrived.
In February this year — with foreign election observers in attendance — Berlin reran the vote for the city’s powerful municipal government, with a result that lost the Social Democrats the mayoralty after the party scored its worst result in a century.
But for months German politicians have also been squabbling about the validity of the federal vote, held on the same day in 2021.
That vote must now be re-held after more than two years in 455 of Berlin’s 2,256 electoral districts, judges at Germany’s constitutional court in Karlsruhe declared on Tuesday in the final word on the matter. Berlin’s returning officer, Stephan Bröchler, said the vote would be scheduled for February 11.
While the ruling supersedes an earlier decision by the German parliament that a smaller number of districts should be re-contested, it is also sufficiently limited to mean that little is likely to change in the results.
For the 38 MPs elected on the left-wing die Linke ticket, that comes as a huge relief.
Because of the electoral thresholds in German law, if the election of just one of the three Berlin-elected MPs from their number had been ruled invalid, then all 38 of them would have been at risk of being kicked out of parliament.
That would have also ejected the newly formed, and much hyped, leftist political party of Sahra Wagenknecht from parliament, because she and colleagues entered as die Linke representatives.
Germany’s opposition conservative Christian Democrats had said in Karlsruhe that at least half of Berlin’s voters needed a chance to vote again in the federal election.
The hard right Alternative für Deutschland had meanwhile petitioned the court for the entire federal election in the city to be rerun.
In its judgment, the court said it mostly agreed with the Bundestag’s original findings on a limited repeat of the process, even though it identified a number of worrying further electoral mis-steps that cast wider doubt on how the day had been run.
For example, postal votes appeared to have been counted in the wrong districts in some instances, meaning that results from those districts also now had to be invalidated.
“The decision of the German Bundestag [was] based on an insufficient clarification of the electoral process, as it neither evaluated the minutes of the individual electoral districts itself, nor arranged for them to be evaluated in any other way,” the court said in its judgment.
Had the Bundestag scrutinised the minutes, which were made in real time by officials at polling stations on the election day, then it would have identified further errors, it said.
At the time, city officials blamed the debacle on disruption caused by the Berlin marathon, which was held on the same day as the vote, leading to problems with the delivery of ballots and counting.
For critics, including the main opposition parties, it was more symptomatic of how badly governed the capital had become after years of Social Democratic party rule.
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