Status: 10.09.2021 3:29 p.m.
The polling institute Forsa and the Federal Returning Officer are taking to court. It is about the question of whether data from postal voters may be used to collect the Sunday question about the federal election.
The Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel and the opinion research institute Forsa are arguing in court over the so-called Sunday question. The procedure will be decided “promptly”, said a spokeswoman for the Wiesbaden administrative court of the agency dpa. “Business Insider” had previously reported on it.
The proceedings have been pending since September 7th. The point of contention is the question that polling institutes regularly ask randomly selected citizens: “If there were elections to the Bundestag on Sunday, whom would they vote for?” Forsa also asks whether someone has already voted by letter and if so, who.
Threatened a fine of 50,000 euros
Forsa boss Manfred Güllner said that the institute had applied for an interim order from the Wiesbaden Administrative Court. According to the Reuters agency, the reason is a letter from the federal returning officer to the polling institute on August 24th. There is a threat of a fine of 50,000 euros if the institutes ask postal voters about their voting behavior in their polls and then incorporate this into the Sunday question.
Violation of federal electoral law?
According to Thiel, this contradicts Paragraph 32 of the Federal Election Act. According to this, voting data from voters should not be used until 6 p.m. on election day, September 26th. The law states: “The publication of the results of voter surveys after the vote on the content of the voting decision is not permitted before the election period has expired.”
Thiel had therefore advised Forsa that it was illegal to query the postal voters’ decisions. This year, with a voter turnout of 70 to 75 percent, a record letter vote share of up to 57.2 percent is forecast.
Forsa: data is “aggregated”
Forsa, on the other hand, is of the opinion that publishing the results before the election does not violate Section 32. The data would only be published “aggregated” with the other survey results, so that a mixture of responses from postal voters and voters occurs. The information provided by postal voters would not be shown separately. The passage in the electoral law only refers to surveys on election day itself – so so-called exit polls, for example when leaving the polling station, said the Forsa boss.
Güllner argued to the AFP news agency: “If we were to leave out the decisions of the postal voters, the poll results would be wrong because, for example, AfD voters vote more often at the ballot box.” In previous state elections such as in Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD was initially overestimated in the election result published at 6 p.m. on the evening of the election. The party later came up with fewer percentages overall after counting the postal ballots.
The practice of including postal voters in the Sunday question has been in use for a long time. It was strange that the Federal Returning Officer had only now complained, said Güllner.