The traffic light coalition wants the Bundestag elections to be repeated in 431 of the almost 2,300 Berlin constituencies. This was announced by the first parliamentary directors of the SPD and Greens parliamentary groups, Katja Mast and Irene Mihalic, and their FDP colleague Johannes Vogel on Wednesday evening. The traffic light coalition thus goes significantly less far than the Federal Returning Officer. This had spoken out in favor of a repetition in half of the Berlin Bundestag constituencies.
In the capital, there had been significant breakdowns in the federal elections. Some polling stations ran out of ballots, others gave out false ones. In some places voting had to be suspended for two hours. There were huge queues. In many polling stations you could therefore still cast your vote well after 6 p.m., in one local even until 9 p.m. The first projections had been available for hours.
The federal election took place at the same time as the election to the Berlin House of Representatives. On November 16, the Berlin Constitutional Court will decide whether it should be repeated. It is expected that the House of Representatives election will have to be largely or even completely repeated.
It is not the Berlin Constitutional Court that has to decide on the repetition of the Bundestag elections, but the Bundestag. Its election examination committee makes a recommendation for this. Katja Mast, Irene Mihalic and Johannes Vogel now announced that the members of the traffic light groups in the Election Review Committee had agreed that the federal elections should only be repeated in 431 electoral districts.
The Election Review Committee will meet again this Thursday. According to the will of the traffic light coalition, the Bundestag should then discuss its recommendation on November 10th or 11th.
“We want to repeat the federal elections where citizens were actually unable to cast their votes due to electoral errors that were found,” says the joint statement by Mast, Mihalic and Vogel. “The requirement to protect an elected people’s representative body” should be “weighed against the effects of a specifically determined electoral error”. It is “also about the legal certainty of the election result of September 26, 2021”. Around 70 percent of the voters cast their votes at the time, and their valid vote must also be respected.
“Where there were relevant election errors, there is a repeat election”
The statement by the parliamentary executive directors states that a very simple rule now applies: “Where there have been relevant electoral errors, there will be a re-election. Where there have been no electoral errors, there will be no re-election presented again in the general election.”
Most recently, the traffic light groups had only aimed for a repetition in around 300 constituencies. They were heavily criticized for this. They seem to have responded to that. The first parliamentary director of the Union faction, Thorsten Frei, had complained that the traffic lights had “turned the criteria until the politically desired result of only 300 polling stations came out”.