German Elections Might Be Re-Run in Berlin Over Vote Irregularities

BERLIN, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 22: A voter casts his ballot in German federal elections as a
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Last year’s German federal elections in Berlin were so riddled with irregularities that at least six areas in the capital should have a do-over, the country’s elections administrator said this week.

In the first-ever public hearing of the election examination committee of the German parliament (Bundestag), MPs were told by elections administrator George Thiel that half of Berlin’s constituencies (six of twelve) had experienced enough irregularities on the September 26th election last year to warrant a repeat of the vote.

Thiel said that the elections experienced “a complete systemic failure” and questioned: “What else has to happen that we see elections as repeatable or illegal?”

The election, which was held amid coronavirus restrictions, was also plagued by the fact that it was scheduled on the same day as the Berlin Marathon, which caused traffic jams, resulting in some polling stations being closed for up to two hours for lack of ballots, Tagesspiegel reported.

Thiel also reported that over 250 stations were kept open past the 6:30 cut off time, wrong ballots were used, and underage people were allowed to vote, as has been previously reported by Germany’s public broadcaster.

The six Berlin constituencies pointed to for potential re-elections included Mitte, Pankow, Reinickendorf, Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and Berlin-Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The elections administrator also said that the Reinickendorf constituency could have its vote overturned as it was decided by such a narrow margin.

In last year’s elections, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered a humiliating loss  to the leftist Social Democrat Party (SPD), which secured 25.7 per cent of the vote compared to 24.1 per cent for the CDU.

As the SPD failed to secure enough of the vote share to govern the country outright, now-Chancellor Olaf Scholz was forced to form a coalition government with the German Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP).

The CDU has seized on the voting irregularities, with the party’s Berlin Secretary-General Stefan Evers saying: “While in other parts of the country the Bundestag election was organized flawlessly despite the flood disaster, the election itself became a disaster in Berlin.

“It is obvious that the mistakes of the Senate are so serious that at least large parts of the Bundestag and parliamentary elections must be repeated. Probably the election to the state parliament is even flawed overall.”

While the six constituencies would likely not be enough to overturn the national results of the election, a revote could serve to further damage the leftist Chancellor Scholz, whose party last week lost a local election to the CDU in North Rhine-Westphalia, a bellwether state.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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