Parliamentary elections are held in Germany on September 26. The balance of power in the Bundestag determines who the deputies will elect as chancellor and what the composition of the new government will be. Not only in Russia, but also in Germany, there are fears that the elections could be subject to manipulation. True, in German realities we are talking exclusively about the risk of external influence, since it is quite difficult to manipulate or falsify the vote in Germany from the inside – largely because it is carried out “in the old fashioned way.” What risk of falsification is possible and how is the German voting procedure protected from such attempts?
The limits of the administrative resource in the Federal Republic of Germany
One should start by stating a banal fact: elections in Germany are held competitively, and their result is not known in advance. There is no “administrative resource”, that is, large-scale illegal assistance from the ruling politicians capable of significantly influencing the outcome of the vote. One of the reasons: the apparatus of power in the FRG is not monolithic – the ruling parties at the federal level do not always have a majority in the federal lands, cities, communities, and so on: it will not be possible to “lower the order from above”.
Anyone can become an observer at the elections in Germany
Voting in Germany is still carried out with a ballpoint pen and paper ballot, sealed ballot boxes and manual counting. Local election commissions are formed from volunteers.
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There are 88 thousand polling stations in the country, with from 3 to 7 assistants at each polling station. In total, up to 700 thousand people participate in the organization of elections in this way, who must simultaneously monitor the observance of order. Each receives a small remuneration, but not less than € 30 – some regional authorities pay more.
There is no video surveillance, but face-to-face surveillance is open to everyone
Anyone can both help and observe the counting of votes at the polling station. Voting is secret, but the counting of votes is public. There are also international observers – since 2009, the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has come to the elections to the Bundestag.
There is no video surveillance at polling stations in Germany. Germans are generally opponents of video cameras in public space – because of concern about the protection of personal data, and at polling stations, the courts ruled, cameras can raise doubts about the principle of secret ballot. True, by chance cameras may end up at a polling station, if the premises for it have been allocated, for example, by a bank branch, but the cameras on that day should either be turned to the side or turned off.
Carousels don’t work, and here’s why
“Carousels” – when the same people go to different polling stations and vote for the “right” candidate – have not yet been recorded in Germany. They don’t even really understand how this is possible at all. After all, the organization of “merry-go-rounds” presupposes at least a rather extensive conspiracy – between the interested party, independent assistants from the electoral commissions and people who are ready to vote for another person.
Considering that assistants in election commissions are chosen randomly, often advocate for different parties and are not afraid of pressure from the “administrative resource”, in practice such a collusion is extremely unlikely. Not to mention that this is a criminal offense, for which in Germany, as well as in the Russian Federation, one can get up to five years in prison.
But there are also formal barriers preventing such falsifications. To get your hands on the ballot, you must present an identity card and a personal notice – an invitation to the election, which contains the name and address of a particular voter. Without such a notice, for example, in case of its loss, it is also possible to vote, but after careful verification of passport data with the information indicated in the voter list. However, the notice is usually checked against this list.
Voter counting as a prevention of “stuffing”
“Stuffing” in Germany is a big rarity: it is difficult, considering that, as a rule, people of different political views sit in election commissions, but with a common interest: that the votes be counted honestly. There are other factors that prevent fraud. First, each polling station has a small number of voters – an average of about 700 people. “Superfluous” ballots in the ballot box will certainly catch your eye. Secondly, the local authorities regularly update the voter lists; “dead souls” rarely remain. Thirdly, the results are considered valid only after recalculation.
There was, however, a case in local elections, when in Bavaria, attackers forged the residence certificates of 400 seasonal workers from Romania (they, as EU citizens, can participate in the elections of self-government bodies in Germany) in order to obtain the required notices of the elections. But this, apparently, is an isolated case: the deception was revealed, the trial is underway. In general, there are chances of such falsifications, but negligible.
As a result, the number of errors in the counting of votes – malicious or oversight – is minimal. An example of previous elections to the Bundestag: the discrepancy between the preliminary and final results was, according to the head of the Federal Election Commission Georg Thiel, less than 17 thousand votes. With 61 million voters, this is less than 0.03 percent.
There is no electronic voting in Germany
The reliability of the voting results is partly due to the fact that electronic voting is not used in Germany. Attempts to introduce it, however, were made in 1999, but later they were abandoned, and in 2009 the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic of Germany stopped this practice altogether.
The electronic voting system in the elections to the Bundestag was tested (photo of 2002), but in the end it was abandoned
But not because the judges are Luddites, opponents of everything new, but because electronic voting would violate the principles of secret voting, on the one hand, and public vote counting, on the other. Electronic voting can be returned – if (and when) legislators figure out how to ensure transparent control of the vote count by observers. Today, electronics are connected only at the very last stages of the counting of votes to transfer data to the Federal Election Commission on secure Internet communications, the risk of hacking which the authorities say is negligible. But the opportunity to manually recount the ballots always remains.
A bottleneck in the electoral system of the Federal Republic of Germany – voting by mail
Increasingly, Germans are voting without coming to the polling station, but by sending a ballot by mail. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the proportion of such voters may reach, according to preliminary estimates, 40 percent! For conspiracy theorists, mostly of the radical right, voting by mail is the main “horror story.” Allegedly, ballots are sent out without demand, or, conversely, they mysteriously disappear – of course, if the vote is cast for a right-wing radical candidate. Similar claims can be found on conspiracy theorists’ Telegram channels. There is no confirmation of these statements.
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But the Federal Constitutional Court of the Federal Republic of Germany also recognized that the danger of falsification in voting by mail is higher than in the presence of a private ballot. After all, no one can control how you make a choice at home, whether you are under pressure.
An example of such rigging was the 2016 local elections in the city of Quackenbrück. There, one of the parties (the Left Party) unexpectedly won more than 60 percent of the vote – several times more than it received on average in this region. The anomaly was noticed. It turned out that some of the signatures on the ballots did not match the signatures on other documents of the same voters. The culprit was the local Left Party leader Andreas Maurer and several of his accomplices. They persuaded voters to vote for them, taking advantage of their naivety, their ignorance of German, and even their indifference to the fate of their ballots. When necessary, Maurer and his accomplices filled out ballots for voters themselves.
But all the attempts of fraud recorded over the past 20 years were few and not so significant as to influence the outcome of the elections. And when it comes to voting by mail, Georg Thiel also reassures: “Voting by mail is reliable.”
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