Voters in Saarland cannot vote for the Greens in the Bundestag election with a second vote.

The federal electoral committee on Thursday rejected the party's complaint against the decision of the Saarland state electoral committee not to allow the state list there.

The reason for this are errors in the compilation of the list.

The decision is final;

theoretically, it could be cited as a reason for an election review complaint after the election.

The Greens in Saarland had only drawn up a state list after great internal party turbulence.

However, due to a decision by the party's federal arbitration court, no delegates from the Saarlouis local association took part in the decisive meeting of representatives.

If they had been there, they would have made up around a third of the members of the assembly and thus had a decisive influence on the list.

The federal electoral committee came to the conclusion that the exclusion of the delegates from Saarlouis from the list was not justified.

The committee discussed the matter long and controversially.

Ultimately, six of the ten committee members present voted to reject the party complaint, two voted against and two abstained.

The body actually has eleven members;

Hartmut Geil, who was sent to the committee by the Greens, declared himself biased and only took part as a spectator.

In addition to the Federal Returning Officer, the Federal Electoral Committee includes a judge at the Federal Administrative Court and eight assessors who are proposed by the parties in the Bundestag.

Federal Returning Officer refers to loophole in the law

The federal electoral committee granted a complaint by the Bremen AfD regional association on Thursday.

The state electoral committee had previously not approved the list because a secretary elected by the AfD's assembly had refused to make a required affidavit.

Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel said that it should not happen that an individual could break up an election meeting at his own discretion.

There is a “loophole in the law” with regard to possible ways out for the party concerned.

With the decision of the Federal Electoral Committee, the state list is approved.

It was nine against one with one abstention.

In the 2017 federal election, the AfD in Bremen received a good 33,000 second votes with 10.0 percent at the time.