Berlin Sends Out Wrong Ballots Ahead of Election
To correct the problem, the district election office has to contact around 1,400 eligible voters. It's not the first time there are issues connected to elections in Berlin.
Berlin’s state election authorities have acknowledged a blunder in the distribution of postal ballots before the upcoming Berlin House of Representatives election on September 20th. Certain voters in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district were mistakenly given ballot papers intended for another constituency. State Returning Officer Stephan Bröchler disclosed the error on Wednesday, affecting constituencies 3 and 4, which were dispatched on August 24th and 25th.
Constituency 3 spans from Spandauer Damm and Schlossstrasse in the north to Adenauerplatz and Kurfürstendamm in the south, while constituency 4 extends from Otto-Suhr-Allee and the Spree riverbank in the north to Strasse des 17. Juni and Savignyplatz in the south. To date, six instances have been documented where voters received ballot papers from the incorrect constituency during the ballot stuffing process, as reported by German-language publications.
Human error, Bröchler emphasized, is an inevitable occurrence in any election; thus, the immediate focus is on rectifying the mistake comprehensively. Any votes cast using the incorrect ballot papers would be rendered invalid. To address the issue, the district election office intends to contact approximately 1,400 eligible voters who might be impacted.
Any voter who received the incorrect ballot papers or remains uncertain can contact the election office to receive new postal voting documents. Once the replacement occurs, the double voting is eliminated, and ballot secrecy remains intact. Governing Mayor Kai Wegner of the CDU commended Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf’s district mayor Kirstin Bauch of the Greens for their prompt action.
In a statement via the Berlin Senate Chancellery’s press office, Wegner affirmed that elections are the cornerstone of German democracy, and every vote holds significance. He stressed that every Berliner must have confidence that the city's elections are conducted securely, fairly, and conveniently, and expressed gratitude to Bauch for ensuring this.
He anticipated the Senate Interior Administration and the State Returning Officer to collaborate to guarantee the election proceeds smoothly throughout the entire city, including Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, positioning this as a fundamental responsibility of the state owed to its residents. However, Kian Niroomand of the SPD, the party’s candidate in the affected constituency 3, while acknowledging the seriousness with which the error is being handled, expressed concerns regarding the burden on affected voters.
He noted that those affected must detect the letter, understand its contents correctly, and subsequently take action themselves, either by acquiring the correct documents or rectifying a vote already cast. Niroomand pointed out that some affected voters may not even be in Berlin, for example if they are traveling, and the letter could easily be overlooked.
He voiced doubts that a letter alone to around 1,400 affected voters would be sufficient. Ultimately, what matters is that it can be definitively ruled out that votes are invalidated due to a wrongly sent ballot paper. The Berlin House of Representatives election is scheduled for September 20th. Postal ballots can still be requested online until Tuesday, September 15th.
From September 16th, voters must contact their local district election office directly. Following a series of issues during the last regular elections in Berlin in September 2021, including voters not receiving ballots at some of the 2,256 polling stations or receiving the wrong ones, the elections were repeated on February 12th, 2023. Measures were implemented to prevent such errors from recurring.
Written by urgent.news from The Berlin Spectator's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
