A significant series of errors and negligence affected the elections to an extent that, the court considered, the results were affected.
The Constitutional Court of Berlin declared void this Wednesday the elections to the regional parliament of the city-state of Berlin and to the municipal councils of the twelve districts of the German capital held on September 26, 2021.
After evaluating, among other data, the protocols of the 2,256 polling stations, the court came to the conviction that constitutional standards can only be guaranteed by declaring said elections void in their entirety , according to a statement.
“In view of the number and seriousness of the irregularities, a specific repetition in isolated constituencies would not be adequate to re-establish a situation in accordance with the Constitution” , underlined the ruling.
A string of errors
Already during the preparation of the elections, which coincided with the legislative elections, there were pervasive errors that were, in the opinion of the magistrates, the cause of the problems registered on voting day.
Thus, for example, the regional electoral commission made an “unrealistic” of the time that each voter would need to enter their ballots, with which he underestimated how long the process would take and did not pay attention to the actual number of voters with the right to vote in each polling place.
In addition, although it had been reported that errors had occurred during the printing of the ballots, not all districts reviewed the cards received, which led to at least five of 12 districts distributing ballots corresponding to other constituencies that resulted in votes that had to be annulled.
Some polling stations did not receive enough ballots and were unable to replace them throughout the day quickly enough, forcing them to close for hours without informing voters when they would reopen.
Other districts even they decided to photocopy ballots on their own initiative, without taking into account that these cards would later be declared invalid and without being able to provide data on the volume thus distributed.
Another irregularity was the opening of numerous polling stations after 6:00 p.m., when the first exit polls were already released.
For all this, “not only isolated voters, but Thousands of them were prevented from exercising their right to vote in Berlin or were unable to do so effectively, without having been influenced, or were only able to do so under unacceptable conditions”.
Decisive effect in the results
The ruling is also based on the fact that at least between 20,000 and 30,000 votes were affected by the irregularities, a sufficient figure to have had an impact on the distribution of seats.
The statement qualified that the decision affects only to the municipal and regional elections but not to the legislative ones, whose repetition at the level of the German capital has already been approved by the Bundestag (the lower house of Parliament).
The elections to the house of representatives of the city-state of Berlin and the municipal councils of the 12 districts must be repeated by legal imperative within a period of 90 days, that is, no later than the middle of next February, the court recalled.
The election day of September 26, 2021 in the German capital was described as “day of chaos”, after many voters had to queue for hours to exercise their right , to later find in some cases that not q They had the necessary ballots.
Restrictions due to the pandemic and the Berlin marathon helped slow down the process even more.