Queues and malfunctions: in Berlin you need to be patient to choose

Sunday 26 September 2021

Snakes and accidents
In Berlin you need patience to vote

Queues at polling stations, closed doors and exchanged ballot papers – this is the reality of Sunday’s elections in Berlin. The difficulties are due, among other things, to more votes at once than anywhere else.

Today, Berliners not only vote in elections to the Bundestag, but also vote for the lower house and county councils. They are also voting on a referendum to “expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.”. According to the state’s oversight of the elections, there were not a large number of votes in a single day in Berlin. This means that the voting documents are very extensive and the voting process also takes longer.

At many of the more than 2,000 polling stations in the capital, the consequences were clear, and long queues formed in some cases. Election workers report waiting times of up to an hour and a half before voting. Voters should take this into account when planning their vote. By noon, 27.4 percent of all eligible voters had cast their ballots. Turnout was as high as it was in the 2017 federal election, when it was 27.2 percent at the time, the state’s return officer announced.

Votes may be cast until 6 p.m., after which the election officer will declare the voting time has expired. According to federal election regulations, only voters who have attended before the end of the election period and have been in or have been in the voting room for reasons of space are allowed to vote. Once all such voters have cast their ballots, the election official announces the closure of the electoral process. Only then can the counting begin.

Fire service on the door lock

At some polling stations in Berlin, there were also delays and incorrect voting. Ballot papers from the Friedrichshain/Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg/Wilmersdorf regions are affected. At polling stations 404, 407 and 408 at Spartacus Primary School in Friedrichshain, according to information from the polling station, only ballot papers from Charlottenburg/Wilmersdorf were available for the lower house election.

Until the correct ballot papers were delivered, polling stations had to be temporarily closed. After that too, there was only a delay. In addition, some votes on fraudulent ballot papers had to be declared invalid. At polling station Friedrichshain 423, voting between them had to be stopped, according to ntv.de information, because one of the ballot papers had run out. In the morning the apparently wrong notes were delivered first and then very few correct ones were handed out.

Only with the help of the fire brigade, voters were able to get to the polling booths and vote at two polling stations in the Booth University of Applied Sciences building on Luxembourg Street in Berlin Mitte. Due to problems with the electronic lock system, the electoral team was unable to reach the Student Union North Cafeteria building with polling stations 102 and 106 on schedule. As a result, polling stations were only able to open after a delay. This also caused a queue of voters to form. They had to wait a while before everything was back to normal. He was not aware of any case of a person who could not make a choice because of it. “There are solutions,” Radebach says.

At some other polling stations, too, voting began with hurdles. Some election workers were abolished in a short time. According to information from the RBB, 70 people reported contracting the disease in the Pankow district on Saturday alone. In the previous days, there were already 200 sick leave. According to information from the provincial return officer’s office, it has been populated via replacement rolls. The director of the polling station in Spandau did not appear, so the electoral register had to be picked up by the police.