The number of postal voters has been increasing from election to election for years. In the times of Corona, this trend is likely to intensify again significantly. (Nestor Bachmann/dpa)
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Corona will not only influence the federal election on September 26th thematically, but also organizationally: Bremen expects that around half of all voters will vote by postal vote. That would be almost twice as many as in the 2017 election. The pandemic also has an impact on election workers. You have moved forward in vaccination priority.
According to the current legal situation, the Bundestag election is to be carried out unchanged as ballot box and postal voting, whereby the voting documents are only sent on request, according to a draft for the internal deputation, which meets on Thursday. At the federal level there have been no signals this year that there will be a change in the law in this regard. Nevertheless, due to the pandemic, it cannot be completely ruled out that the election will have to be carried out differently as an exception, which is why the Bremen and Bremerhaven electoral offices continued to adapt to alternative scenarios.
In addition to the usual combination of ballot box voting and postal voting, pure postal voting would also be conceivable. Or a ballot box, in which all voters would automatically receive the voting documents in advance. Each voter could then decide whether he would actually vote by postal vote with the ballot slip sent to him or whether he would prefer to vote in a polling station on September 26th.
For both Bremen and Bremerhaven, if the pandemic continues until election day, the interior authorities expect postal votes of up to 50 percent. On the one hand, the increase so far in the past federal elections plays a role in this. If this trend is continued, a postal vote of around 30 percent would be expected in the 2021 federal election. On the other hand, the increase in the postal voting rate expected due to Corona, which would, however, largely depend on the further course of the pandemic and, in particular, on the progress made with vaccinations.
The state elections in March in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate provided a certain indication of the increase in the number of postal voters. In Baden-Württemberg the percentage of postal voters rose from 21.0 (state elections 2016) to 51.6 percent, in Rhineland-Palatinate from 30.6 to 66 percent. In a model calculation, the interior authorities also took into account the increases in the local elections in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia in March 2021 and September 2020, respectively. Overall, the percentage of postal votes in these four elections under pandemic conditions was on average 2.16 times higher than in the previous elections without Corona. Applied to the general election in Bremen, this would result in a postal voting rate of 64.8 percent (30 percent multiplied by a factor of 2.16).
However, it must be taken into account that a large part of the population will be vaccinated by the federal election, emphasizes the interior authority. The rates of increase in postal votes are therefore not easily transferable to the federal election in September. In Bremen it is assumed that “at least the majority of those eligible to vaccinate” will have received a vaccination offer by the time of the general election. Therefore, an actual increase in the percentage of postal votes to 65 percent is not to be expected. Taking into account a considerable safety margin, a rate of up to 50 percent is realistic.
With around 390,000 eligible voters and a turnout of around 75 percent in the city of Bremen, the Bremen Electoral Office expects around 146,250 postal voters. At the same time, however, it will be ensured that an exclusive postal vote can also be implemented. For example, in view of the threat of capacity bottlenecks nationwide, 400,000 red polling envelopes are being procured as a precaution. The same preparations would also be made in the Bremerhaven election office. A postal voting rate of up to 50 percent is also expected in Seestadt.
An advance by Bremen to the Federal Ministry of the Interior ended successfully. It was about the question of whether election workers can be given priority vaccination against the virus according to the current Corona Vaccination Ordinance. The legal situation in this regard was not clear in January, but the ambiguities have now been resolved, says Rose Gerdts-Schiffler, spokeswoman for the interior authority.
The vaccination sequence stipulates that first people with the highest priority, then those with high priority, then those with higher priority and then the other citizens should be vaccinated. In the regulation, which was revised in March, election workers are now also included in the group of people who are entitled to vaccinations with “higher priority”. To classify: This category includes “relevant” people such as the Bremen senators.
Down to business
ascending trend
Even before Corona, the number of postal voters in the last three federal elections in Bremen rose. 57,851 people used this option to vote in the 2009 Bundestag election, which made up 20.1 of all votes cast. Four years later there were 60,331 (21.6 percent); in the 2017 election, 74,925 people from Bremen voted by postal vote, which means 26.4 percent of the votes cast.
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