Upcoming European balloting - Election materials showed up twice: a visit from the voting commission.
In certain areas of Pankow, Berlin, spellbound citizens had the misfortune of receiving their ballot papers twice by mistake. The district election office verified this misfortune and declared that the cases involved were fewer than ten. Luckily, the recipient who pointed out the repetitive delivery was given a visit from an election office worker on a Sunday to recover the redundant ballot papers. The state election office acknowledged the circumstance. This error was a lone wolf mistake handled informally and swiftly by the Pankow electoral office by having their employee reclaim the redundant ballot papers from the affected citizen. Following a string of unrelated reports, the Pankow electoral office had amended its internal processes and educated their staff to prevent similar faux pas in the future.
As reported by the daily journal "taz," Kleinert, the Pankow electoral office's overseer, said his team was determined to promptly inform and aid those impacted, correcting the issue as promptly as possible.
A staggering rise in the number of ballot papers has been reported compared to the European elections of 2019. Pankow's ballot papers had reached 98,000 by Thursday according to sources.
There have been notices of minor operational issues recently. A printing company in the regions of Steglitz-Zehlendorf and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg profusely supplied partially faded ballot sheets for the European elections on Sunday. The state election office, verifying this, stated that it was a minuscule number of cases. Additionally, an estimated 14,000 online applications for postal voting were dispatched late to postal voting offices. Consequently, the postal voting offices faced acquiescent delays in sending the ballot papers to these applicants. To add insult to injury, the QR code printed on the ballots for the European elections stopped working for a while, which is typically a gateway for a hassle-free ballot paper request. Data received from the state election office in Berlin revealed that about 2.5 million people are eligible voters for the European elections.
Update on the QR code issue in postal voting Update on the delay in postal voting Details on the European elections Discussing the issue in the "taz" newspaper on Thursday, 6th May 2021
