House election: Noticeably many invalid votes in 99 Berlin electoral districts

For days there have been increasing reports that ballot papers from other constituencies or districts were issued and used in Berlin polling stations.

A statistical analysis by the rbb24 data team now shows that there were a striking number of invalid votes in at least 99 electoral districts in the capital. This affects at least 13,120 votes in all ballots that were counted as invalid in the preliminary official final result.

The District Returning Officer of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Rolfdieter Bohm, finds clear words for this: “If a non-officially intended ballot is used, the vote is invalid.”

Even if the will of the voters can be seen on these ballot papers, that doesn’t help, says Bohm. A ballot from another district is a false ballot. Period.

The district returning officers currently have to check how often this has happened on the basis of the minutes.

“I heard that in constituencies 5 and 6 in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg AGH-Erstimmen ballot papers for constituency 1 were issued. We are now checking that in the minutes of the electoral boards,” says District Returning Officer Bohm. “If that’s true, it would be a mistake by the local electoral authorities. By us. I don’t want to shirk our responsibility.”

The district election committee must assess whether these election errors have a significant impact on the outcome of the election. In constituency 5 in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg [wahlen-berlin.de] about the second, Steffen Zillich (left), only 2222 first votes separate from first place Vasili Franco (Greens).

“If the wrong ballot papers could have an impact on the result, then you might have to make a by-election after a corresponding decision by the Constitutional Court,” says Bohm.

For the data analysis, the official preliminary election results of the 2254 electoral districts were evaluated and compared with the figures from the last elections. Rbb24 defined those electoral districts as statistically significant outliers in which the proportion of invalid votes is five percentage points higher than in the last ballot (Bundestag election second votes, House election second votes and district electoral assembly).

Since the referendum and first-vote elections to the Bundestag and House of Representatives cannot be compared with previous elections, all those electoral districts are defined as outliers in which the number of invalid votes deviates by at least ten percentage points from the mean.

Such high proportions of invalid votes in 99 electoral districts indicate systematic errors – for example because incorrect ballot papers were issued or the postal voting process was complex. A system failure.

In the analysis, constituencies were sorted out that always have a high proportion of invalid votes.

The graph below shows how much the proportion of invalid votes has risen in some constituencies.

According to District Returning Officer Bohm, the regional election control knew long before the election that ballot papers had been sorted or issued incorrectly. This had already been noticed in August. “We did a random test and noticed that not all of the ballot papers, as labeled in the boxes, were correctly sorted,” says Bohm.

According to Bohm, a leaflet was produced to warn the electoral boards. “The regional election control had made an information sheet for all electoral boards that read:” Please check whether the ballot papers fit. “

It was probably of little use. In addition to the super election day and the marathon, the pandemic made organization difficult. “We couldn’t train all election officers due to Corona,” admits District Returning Officer Bohm.

District Returning Officer Bohm also confirms that ballot papers from another district have ended up in the polls in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. “When I found out that some voting districts in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg had given out second-vote ballots from Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf for the House of Representatives election, we immediately phoned all electoral boards,” says Bohm. Together with others, they immediately formed a telephone chain on Sunday in order to call everyone through as quickly as possible.

“About a quarter of the electoral officers I spoke to – those of AGH constituency 1 – had actually come into contact with these false ballot papers. Some had actually already given these ballot papers to the voters. These votes are invalid.”

According to the preliminary official final result, 607 second votes in constituency 1 in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg were considered invalid.

On Tuesday, rbb24 confronted the Neukölln district election control with three statistical irregularities. In the case of two constituencies in the federal election (08W317 and 08W507), a recount is now taking place as a precaution, the electoral authority replied on Wednesday.

One of the results of the district election had apparently rotated the numbers – instead of 104, there would only be four invalid votes in the 08W220 constituency. “The correction of the quick report / data collection has now been made retrospectively,” says Kristian Schieman, the district and district election manager Neukölln.

4.6 percent of the votes in the referendum were invalid. The value is significantly higher than in the other simultaneous elections, where one to two percent invalid votes were counted.

A statistically significant outlier is the 08324 constituency in the Hermann Sander primary school in Neukölln, where according to the official preliminary final result [wahlen-berlin.de] over 69 percent of the votes were counted as invalid.

Even if all 85,000 invalid votes were actually to be counted against the referendum, the result of the decision would not change.