The UEL is concerned about two developments in relation to the postal voting delays and irregularities in vote counting following Germany’s Federal elections on 23 February 2025.
On 8 November 2024, Federal Returning Officer Ruth Brand warned Chancellor Scholz that not fully utilizing the full 60-day period between the Bundestag‘s dissolution and the election could lead to logistical challenges, particularly for voters abroad, and noted that there is “a high risk that the cornerstone of democracy and trust in the integrity of the election could be violated.”
These concerns during the election materialized as significant postal delays prevented many of the 213,000 registered voters abroad from participating in the elections and thus deciding on the political future of their country. Some mail-in ballots were never delivered or arrived too late, raising questions about the election’s legitimacy, especially since the opposition party BSW needed only 13,435 votes (0.028 percent) according to the provisional count to surpass the five-percent threshold.
Post-election, BSW supporters reported unrecorded votes in many constituencies. Further investigations uncovered errors in vote allocation, valid ballots being miscounted as invalid ones, and transmission issues between district electoral administrations and the Federal Electoral Administration. Corrections have adjusted results in favor of the BSW (with, for example, 1,295 additional votes found for the BSW in North-Rhine Westphalia), highlighting discrepancies in the provisional results that need to be addressed.
The Federal Returning Officer generally manages data for national-level elections, while local authorities handle constituency and municipal-level data. Some of these authorities make their data public, while others do not have this data or don’t make it available. It is evidently impossible to identify all errors based on the available data alone. A complete comprehensive recount is necessary to determine whether the BSW truly failed to meet the five-percent threshold.
From the ongoing recounts, with 90,000 voting districts across 299 constituencies, finding a single misallocated vote in every tenth voting district would mean that the BSW can cross the threshold and enter the Bundestag.
Given these complexities, the UEL urges:
• German authorities to address the identified irregularities and conduct a thorough recount before finalizing election results, in order to strengthen democratic legitimacy.
• The Venice Commission to assist German authorities in adhering to the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters, ensuring transparency and accountability.
• The Venice Commission to provide guidance on reforms to improve abroad voting procedures, including registration requirements, embassy voting options, and proxy designations.
• PACE and the chairs of the Monitoring Committee and Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights to uphold democratic principles and safeguard citizens’ rights to free and fair elections by taking meaningful action in response to the issues raised, even in established democracies like Germany.
• Relevant Council of Europe bodies to evaluate whether existing legal frameworks and processes obligate the state to ensuring citizens’ rights to vote abroad in free and fair elections, in a manner consistent with principles of fairness and equal treatment under Germany’s Basic Law.
• The chair of the Parliamentary Assembly Network of Election Observers to inform its members of these developments in Germany and discuss solutions to enhance the credibility of electoral systems, addressing postal voting issues and accuracy of results.
Members of the UEL Bureau