Berlin’s state returning officer Stephan Bröchler considers cyber attacks on the repeat election on February 12 to be possible. “We have to take that into account, and that’s what we’re doing,” said Bröchler of the “taz” (Saturday). “There are warring countries that may have an interest in sabotaging the technical infrastructure, that want to show: Look, everything is collapsing in Berlin,” said Bröchler in a “taz” interview.
Because many problems and errors arose in the elections to the House of Representatives and the twelve district parliaments in September 2021, the Berlin Constitutional Court has one complete repetition arranged. Bröchler is responsible for organizing them. The state returning officer wants to deal openly with possible mishaps or errors in the preparation or conduct of the election, as he emphasized in the interview. “We don’t want to sweep anything under the rug.”
The 60-year-old announced that he would only cast his vote on February 12th. He assumes that the election will be successful. “And going to the polling station on election Sunday is just something special.”
However, there is a great deal of interest in postal voting in the capital: by the end of this week, around three weeks before election day, 512,998 postal voting slips had been issued. The number corresponds to 18.7 percent of those entitled to vote. In 2021 it was 18.5 percent at the same time. The state returning officer publishes these figures on an ongoing basis. In total, around 983,000 people in Berlin requested postal voting documents in 2021, which was around 35 percent of the almost 2.5 million people entitled to vote. (dpa)
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