On Sunday evening it was said in Berlin that the repeat election went largely smoothly. Now, two days later, it is announced that there has been a glitch that may affect the result.
As the Berlin state returning officer Stephan Bröchler told the SZ, 466 ballot letters were mistakenly left behind in the Lichtenberg district. The district initially said on Tuesday afternoon that the post office had failed to deliver it correctly. The letters “were forgotten to be handed over by the post office at the weekend”, wrote the deputy Lichtenberg district mayor Kevin Hönicke (SPD) on Twitter. The electoral office is not to blame.
The result of the recount is expected by Wednesday
The Mirror had first about the fall reported. “It has not yet been finally verified, but it was probably the case that the letters were already in the district election office building on Sunday evening, but were not delivered to the right place,” said Bröchler.
Deutsche Post contradicts the representation of the district. A spokesman said the error was not to be found in the post office, but in the internal post office of the authorities. “We sent all ballot letters that were handed over to us in good time or that we collected late on Saturday in a special box between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. in a special delivery to all election offices on Sunday,” it said later in a written statement .
The spokesman explained that election letters were still occasionally delivered to the district on Monday and Tuesday. However, these are letters that were posted too late by those entitled to vote. This happens regularly in elections. These votes are not included in the result.
After Deutsche Post commented District politician Hönicke corrects himself on Twitter and admits that the mistake must be in the district post office.
What exactly went wrong in the district election office must now be clarified. On Tuesday evening, the district office announced on its website that the ballot letters left behind would be publicly counted on Wednesday morning. The result then flows into the election result, since the letters arrived on time. “No voice is lost,” said Bröchler. There are currently no indications that further incidents have occurred.
Assuming it stays at 466 votes missing, the SPD, with Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey, is unlikely to lose its razor-thin lead of 105 votes over the Greens.
In this election, Lichtenberg is more of a stronghold of the CDU and Left, SPD and Greens are weak there. Assuming that the 466 people voted in a similar way to the other postal voters in the district, then about 75 to 80 votes for the SPD and almost 60 votes for the Greens would be expected. In order to jeopardize Giffey’s lead, the result of the Greens in the group of 466 would have to be extremely much better than that of the SPD and at the same time the CDU, Left and AfD would have to have performed weaker than the district average. This is hardly to be expected.
Editor’s note on transparency: A first version of the text did not contain the statement by Deutsche Post, which vigorously contradicts the Lichtenberg district. We got it later.