Why is a candidate who moved away from Berlin still on the list? And why were postal voting documents sent twice?
The repeat elections are due in Berlin in three weeks, and again the preparations went awry: In the Treptow-Köpenick district, postal voting documents were sent twice in 49 cases. A spokeswoman for the district said the reason was a software error. Affected citizens had drawn the Office’s attention to the double dispatch. The ballot papers sent out were declared invalid and new ones sent out. She explained that invalid documents are sorted out during the count and fraud is therefore not possible.
However, the duplicate documents are not the only mistake that the authorities have made in the past few weeks in preparing for the election. For the Neukölln 2 constituency, for example, the first vote for the FDP included a candidate who had moved away from Berlin. The votes cast for him in the postal vote are therefore invalid, the previous almost 1700 postal voters in the constituency should be written to. In addition, an incorrect date was printed on English-language re-election notices. There the date for the election was September 12, 2023 instead of February 12.
In the meantime, old posters from the September 2021 election have apparently also been hung up again, so that passers-by and drivers in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district noticed ex-CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet on an election poster. The poster was removed shortly thereafter, but an old poster showing the current Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was still hanging in the district. She ran in the 2021 federal election as the top candidate for the Greens. Service providers are to blame for the breakdowns, both parties said.
Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) emphasized that these mistakes were “all isolated cases, smaller isolated cases”. Berlin’s state returning officer Stephan Bröchler recently said that with almost 2.5 million voters and documents, minor errors cannot be completely avoided. There was also good news from the OSCE on Tuesday: The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe does not consider it necessary to send international election observers to Berlin.
The Berlin Constitutional Court had declared the elections of September 26, 2021 invalid due to numerous organizational glitches. On that day, four votes took place in the capital at the same time: the elections to the Bundestag, the House of Representatives and the district parliaments, and Berliners were also able to vote on a referendum on the expropriation of large housing companies. At the same time, the Berlin Marathon was held. As a result, Berliners had to wait in long queues in front of polling stations all day long, ballots went out or were mixed up. In some places, voters voted until well after 6 p.m.