Bundestag election: This is how you vote

Tomorrow, Sunday, there will be elections: What do you have to consider when going to the polling station? What documents do I need to have with me? And is it true that a selfie can invalidate your voice? An overview.

The 20th German Bundestag is elected on September 26th. And it should be an exciting race: The big parties have seldom been so close to each other, and there was a real uphill and downhill run in the surveys. In addition, Angela Merkel will no longer run – after 16 years in the Chancellery. It’s the end of an era.

More than 60 million Germans are called to elect a new parliament. A total of 47 parties are standing for election. But how exactly does voting work? Until when is it possible to vote by post? And what do you have to pay attention to so that there are no problems at the polling station? An overview:

Who can vote at all?

All citizens who have German citizenship, have lived in Germany for at least three months and are not excluded from the right to vote are allowed to vote in the federal election. Exclusion from election is very rare. This must be ordered by a judge. He is only possible for very specific criminal offenses and even then is limited to a maximum of five years.

Overall, in the election for the 20th German Bundestag in the federal territory around 60.4 million Germans are eligible to vote. According to an estimate by the Federal Statistical Office, 31.2 million of these are women and 29.2 million are men. Among them are around 2.8 million first-time voters, i.e. young people who are allowed to vote in a federal election for the first time.

How and when can I cast my vote?

You can vote in person on election day, i.e. on September 26th, at a polling station or in advance by postal vote. For the latter, a voting slip must be applied for in the municipality where you live. The application can be made in person and in writing – but some of the documents can also be applied for online. However, a phone call is not enough. Anyone who has already received a voting notification can use the form on the back and fill it in and return it.

The deadline for a request to vote by post ended on Friday, September 24th, at 6 p.m. In certain exceptions – for example if you suddenly become ill – you can still vote by mail until 3 p.m. on election day.

You can vote in person on September 26th between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. The address of the responsible polling station can be found in the voting notification sent in advance by post, but this can also be requested from the municipality. The polling stations are community rooms that are also suitable for people with physical disabilities, often schools or town halls.

What do I have to bring with me to vote?

When visiting the polling station, you should bring the voting notification and a valid identity card or passport with you. Of course, it is also possible to cast a vote without the voting notification, but in this case it is mandatory to identify yourself at the polling station.

How exactly does the election work?

In the case of larger electoral districts, the electoral rolls may be divided, i.e. different rooms are used in a polling station. This is then signposted accordingly, and there are election workers on site to answer questions.

After checking the voting notification, the voting card will be handed out by the electoral committee. Appropriate voting booths are available to ensure that the election is secret. These can only be visited alone, the only exceptions are small children or assistants. It is also not allowed to film or take photos in the voting booth. If a voter nevertheless takes a selfie with their mobile phone with the completed voting slip, the electoral officers must refuse to accept the voting slip.

There are pens in the voting booth for filling out the voting slip. You can of course also use pens you have brought yourself. After filling out the ballot slip, the voter throws it into the ballot box.

What do first and second votes mean?

In the Bundestag election, each person entitled to vote has two votes. The first vote is cast on the left half of the voting slip. With it, the direct applicant of the constituency is elected. The candidate who has the most votes is elected. A relative majority of the votes is therefore sufficient.

With the second vote, to be cast on the right side of the ballot, the national list of a party is elected. This is decisive for a majority in the Bundestag. Based on the second votes received by the individual parties, the distribution of seats in parliament is calculated using the Sainte-Laguë / Schepers procedure.

This divisor procedure results in the distribution of seats by dividing the second votes of the parties by a certain number: the divisor. The results are then rounded to give the mandates for each party. So that the exact number of seats to be allocated always comes out in this calculation, the appropriate divisor must be determined anew with each election.

How many constituencies are there?

The federal territory is divided into 299 constituencies. How many of these are allocated to the individual federal states depends on their share of the population and is checked before each election. As a result, Bavaria had one more constituency in 2017 than in the 2013 federal election and Thuringia had to give up one constituency in return. There are no changes to the federal election in 2021.

The population of a constituency may not exceed or fall below the average population of the constituencies (currently around 246,000) by more than 25 percent. This requirement makes it necessary to regularly re-cut individual constituencies: Before the federal election in 2021, this was necessary for 13 constituencies. A total of 17 constituencies were delimited.

How many MPs will there be in the Bundestag?

The size of the new parliament cannot really be predicted – it can only be calculated seriously and reliably with the election result. Responsible for this is the complicated regulation of overhang and compensatory mandates, which has often led to an enlargement of the parliament. Surplus mandates are awarded if a party wins more direct mandates through first votes than it would be entitled to according to the second vote result. The Union in particular had benefited from this in the past. Because overhang mandates have to be compensated by compensatory mandates.

After a tough struggle, the grand coalition agreed on a reform of the electoral law in August. However, experts see this as a minimum compromise – too little for a trend reversal. And so it is clear that it should be much tighter in the Reichtag. This is also shown by a look at the past legislative periods: 614 MPs in 2005, 622 in 2009, 631 in 2013 and 709 after the 2017 federal election.

Suffrage expert Robert Vehrkamp from the Bertelsmann Foundation assumes that, in extreme cases, up to 1,000 members could move into the next parliament. But that is difficult to predict and depends on various variables, says the head of the “Future of Democracy” program.