The already very long series “Bankruptcies, bad luck and breakdowns in Berlin” got a whole new season on election Sunday. Reports came in every hour about everything that went wrong in the capital. Ballot papers were missing or incorrectly sorted, couriers who were supposed to bring new ones got stuck in traffic because the Berlin marathon took place. In some places the queues in front of the polling stations were so long that voting was still taking place when the “Tagesschau” was running with the first projections.
And it was improvised in an almost comedic way: electoral boards went from polling station to polling station to scrounge papers, others simply put the ballot papers on the copier. An election worker is said to have asked in the queue of those waiting whether they might want to forego the election to the Berlin House of Representatives, which was held at the same time as the Bundestag election, the slips of paper were just out.
The general election should have been postponed because of the marathon – what?
Even more Berlin were the attempts by those responsible to blame each other for the chaos. In the main role: the State Returning Officer. At first she could not explain how all this had come about, then she blamed the districts for it and only reluctantly resigned her office after much to and fro. But the supporting roles also had strong appearances: The head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery said that the federal government could have put the federal election on a different day than the Berlin marathon, because it was “part of an international sports calendar and couldn’t go back and forth at will be pushed “.
And that was far from the season finale: there are now initial suspicions that the election result might have looked different if everything had been less chaotic. There were noticeably many invalid votes in around a hundred Berlin constituencies. The top candidate of the left, Klaus Lederer, in turn, demands a recount of the votes because he missed his direct mandate to the Berlin House of Representatives by only 30 votes. On Thursday it became known that a Berlin district had reported fictitious results for several polling stations. The District Returning Officer thereupon admitted that these preliminary figures were “estimates”, the correct ones would be “re-recorded”.
That’s Berlin, but that’s also the point at which all of this is no longer funny. Because the latest Berlin breakdown series comes at a time when the democratic institutions are coming under pressure from all sides. In which, through the spread of fake news, attempts are made again and again to question the legitimate outcome of elections. It won’t be long before the first claim the election was stolen.
The debacle has to be dealt with thoroughly
The Berlin Senate now has to deal with the debacle thoroughly and transparently. Eligible voters need to know what exactly happened, and wherever there are doubts about the process, they need to be checked and recounted. For some Experts | there is much to be said for contesting the election, which will ultimately be decided by the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin. Above all, however, Berlin politicians must finally become aware of the responsibility that rests on a capital city. Because a chaotic and perhaps incorrectly executed election is different from a planned airport: It not only affects the taxpayers, but also the heart of democracy.