It was foreseeable that the proportion of postal voters in the 2021 federal election would increase more significantly than ever before.
Because in all state parliament and local elections since the beginning of the corona pandemic, the long-term trend towards more and more postal voters was dynamized by the distance and hygiene rules.
Now the federal election has shown that there will be no return to the status quo ante with an already problematic proportion of almost a third of postal voters.
Especially in countries with experience of elections under pandemic conditions, the percentage of postal voters, sometimes more than 60 percent, is again higher than the mean of almost 48 percent.
However, this also means that the legislature (and with it the Federal Constitutional Court) has done away with the assumption that ballot box voting is the rule and postal voting is the exception.
It is true that the option of postal voting has contributed more than ever to securing the general public of the election.
But when respect for this one electoral principle comes so at the expense of equality of information as another central principle, it is time for lawmakers to act.
The upcoming reform of the federal election law should therefore be used to shorten the period of postal voting so that both principles apply equally.