Once your reputation is ruined, the Germans like to say, life is free and easy. That may explain why Berliners have such a relaxed – some would say resigned – attitude: the city they call home simply has no reputation left to lose.
The German capital works hard to retain its dysfunctional reputation. When its new airport opened its doors in 2020, for instance, it was nine years and, at €6 billion, around 120 per cent over budget.
Now Berlin has outdone itself again, this time over last year’s elections. While the rest of the country closed its ballot boxes on September 26th at 6pm, as agreed, the last polling station in Berlin closed three hours later. Germany’s most senior election officer described events in Berlin later as a “complete systematic failure”.
So what happened? With typical hubris Berlin authorities decided to hold four separate polls at once – federal, state and local elections as well as a referendum – and on the same day as the Berlin marathon closed down much of the inner city.
Compounding matters on election day was widespread ballot paper chaos: some polling stations got too few papers, others got the wrong papers and, in some cases, even distributed them to confused voters.
Election stations that ran out of ballot papers and, unable to reach the central election officer for guidance, took different pragmatic approaches: some simply photocopied ballot papers, others closed their doors for up to two hours as helpers raced through the city to get fresh supplies, but were trapped in marathon roadblocks. Some polling stations sent voters home while others left people queueing for more than two hours in the hot September sun.
No one knows for sure how many Berliners never got to cast their vote as a result of the chaos. Nor is anyone sure of the validity of votes cast long after the first exit polls and projections were known.
A commission of investigation has presented a 64-page report making clear that Berlin’s election-day chaos was not a series of unfortunate events. It castigates Berlin’s dysfunctional bureaucracy for “not only hindering the actual election process but also doing lasting damage to citizens’ trust towards the most important democratic act of participation”.
“The mistakes on election day were no act of God that crashed in on us,” said Prof Stephan Bröchler, a political scientist and member of the investigation panel.
The report frames the poll chaos as a new low point in “organisational deficits”, in particular a century-old competence battle between Berlin’s state government and local authorities.
At election time it is Berlin’s boroughs, not the city-state government, that operate polling stations. Instead of common standards, however, the report found a “crazy paving” approach to polling stations across the boroughs. Most had too few election helpers and, due to over zealous implementation of Covid restrictions, too few cabins for queues of voters handed five different ballot papers.
“Several minutes each in the cabin was normal,” wrote Christian Waldhoff, a Berlin law professor and polling station volunteer. “Sometimes voters needed up to 10 minutes to grasp everything and vote.”
So who is to blame? Berlin electoral law, in hazy language, says the city’s interior senator is responsible for “overseeing” the election in “co-operation” with the boroughs. But Berlin’s outgoing interior senator Andreas Geisel disputed having any responsibility for the election debacle and is now Berlin’s senator for housing and city development. His political survival prompted the report’s authors to demand a rewrite of election law to clarify final political responsibility for the future.
Geisel’s successor as Berlin interior senator, Iris Spranger, said the city-state government would study the report and “do everything to learn – thoroughly – the lessons from the problems that arose”.
But the final word has yet to be spoken on Berlin’s banana republic poll. After the summer a Bundestag committee will decide on whether to hold a full or partial rerun of the federal poll in Berlin – altering who sits for the capital in the Bundestag. In September, meanwhile, Berlin’s highest court will rule on whether to order a total or partial rerun of Berlin’s separate state poll.
The prospect of facing furious voters again means that, for Berlin’s state politicians, an uneasy summer break looms.
